|
|
|
|
|
| |||
 |
|
Old Kapaleeswarar Temple, Mylapore
|
The letters that follow were exchanged between us and the Madras Indian Express resident editor K.V. Ramanathan in June 1990. Up to this time we had firmly believed that our essay on the myth of St. Thomas, written in reply to C.A. Simon's article, would receive due consideration at the Indian Express and would appear in some appropriate form in the newspaper. When this did not happen even three months after submission and when a query sent to the assistant editor C.P. Seshadri 1 was ignored, we sent a registered letter to K.V. Ramanathan on June 1st:
Enclosed is a copy of the article on the St. Thomas myth which I sent by registered post on March 9th to Mr. Seshadri. A query concerning its publication was sent later and never replied to.
This article has been accepted by a respected publisher and will appear in a few months time as a book entitled Saint Thomas: The Man, the Church and the Mylapore Shiva Temple. 2
I am currently expanding the material, and on page four of the revised script will add the footnote, "This article was written in reply to C.A. Simon's 'In Memory of a Slain Saint' which appeared in the Express Weekend of 30 December 1989. It has not been published to date nor has the Indian Express resident editor at Madras replied to the author's queries."
It is not my wish to be unfair to you or the newspaper, and your comments or advice concerning the above note are welcome.
On the other hand, if you do intend to publish the article, or rather a summary of it as the full text cannot appear in a newspaper, then the same should be indicated to me within the next two weeks as I have a deadline to meet.
After months of silence, this letter elicited a response from the Indian Express. K.V. Ramanathan replied to it on June 11th:
Your letter dated the 1st of June.
I find that Express Weekend carried on 13th of January a letter from you commenting on Mr. C.A. Simon's "In Memory of a Slain Saint". We have also published letters from Swami Tapasyananda 3 and Mr. Ved Prakash on the same subject. It is not as if, therefore, the Indian Express refused to give space to your point of view. The availability of space being a severe constraint, Express Weekend finds it very difficult indeed to publish long articles. You yourself concede in the last paragraph of your letter that the full text of your article cannot appear in a newspaper. We believe that having published your letter there is really no need for us to publish a summary of your article also.
Now it is a fact of newspaper publishing that the editor has the prerogative of rejecting material that he does not wish to publish, and this right is strictly exercised in India where the editor usually seeks to mold public opinion rather than inform it. But given the reputation of the Indian Express as a fair-minded newspaper, we decided to do some plain speaking to this editor who equated a letter to the editor with a grossly misleading front page article and would thus absolve himself of further responsibility to the public. Opening our reply with the verses of Jnanasambandar and Arunagirinathar quoted by Swami Tapasyananda—who rightly maintained that the Christian ecclesiastics contention can be proved to be fraudulent with this single evidence—we wrote on June 25th:
As you have bothered to reply to me with your letter of June 11th, I have asked Voice of India to alter the footnote 4 in my essay on St. Thomas and the Kapaleeswara Temple. But I do not know where the book is in the press and you may be too late with your sorry letter of rejection.
Your contention that I have had opportunity to have my say in a letter to the editor of the Express Weekend published on January 13th, is not acceptable. I need hardly tell you that a front page article presented as true history in a trusted newspaper is not refuted simply because a reader writes to the editor. Moreover the important last paragraph of my letter was cut out, which caused Swami Jyotirmayananda to write a letter which carried a serious mistake in meaning, which in turn caused Mr. Ved Prakash to write a correction. Those last two letters and the confusion caused by them would not have been made had the Express Weekend not deliberately tried to suppress the truth about the original Kapaleeswara Temple and the St. Thomas Church.
I am aware that you have a shortage of space in the Indian Express. That is exactly why my essay has been written as it is. Any sub-editor can pick out the material wanted and summarise it without distorting my point of view or conclusions. You may not consider this point of view to be of any value, but it is supported by over forty references named in the article itself.
Aside from poor Marco Polo, where are Mr. C.A. Simon's references? And was his article only a point of view too? And why are you hiding this Mr. Simon so that nobody can write him an opinion? 5
I note that you did not lack any space in the Indian Express when he decided to tell his lies about the Hindus. It may be the truth that the Roman Catholic Church can buy the space she needs from you. I of course cannot. I can only write letters to the editor.
Mr. Harry Miller stated in his column of January 29th that St. Thomas came to India. You did not lack space for this point of view but you also did not publish the letters refuting it. At least two letters were sent to you and him with supporting material. Again on April 23rd you carried an item about a cross planted in Kerala by St. Thomas, and again at least one letter was sent to you pointing out that this was not possible. This letter, too, was not published.
So the truth of the matter is that you do indeed have space to promote this ancient lie about St. Thomas coming to India to get killed by the wicked Hindus and especially the very wicked Brahmins, but that you have no space at all in your newspaper when somebody tries to unmask the fable (except for the three letters already referred to).
Swami Tapasyananda did not get a letter published in the Express Weekend as you have stated, but he has written his own article in The Vedanta Kesari. 6 What he says cannot be ignored. And what Dr. R. Nagaswamy said in The Hindu on April 30th cannot be ignored either. Both are respected authorities in their respective fields.
Your letter of the 11th is disappointing for me. I did believe that I would eventually get fair treatment at the Indian Express. But this aside, what is really distressing is that it appears that you not only connive at this vicious lie being published in your paper to malign the Hindus, but that you actively support it by suppressing the truth no matter how often or in what form it is presented to you.
The resident editor K.V. Ramanathan was not the only one at the Indian Express to hear from us. We had also sent letters to the Madras assistant editor C.P. Seshadri and to the editor-in-chief Arun Shourie at New Delhi. To C.P. Seshadri we wrote in part:
When Mr. Shourie can expose the sordid history of Muslim iconoclasm, why is the same Christian history always covered up in your newspaper? After all, Muslims borrowed their violent ideology from the Christians and Jews. Aurangzeb is nobody in comparison to St. Francis Xavier when it comes to temple-breaking and bloodshed. Yet Muslims today must bear public criticism for their past while the Christians get off free. Why is that?
And to Arun Shourie we wrote in part:
It seems clear from a number of articles published and from the letters of protest or criticism sent to the Madras editor and suppressed (of which I have knowledge—obviously many more letters were received by the editor), that the editor responsible for the material published in the Express Weekend has consistently pursued a policy of promoting Roman Catholic doctrine at the expense of historical truth.... The manipulation of history and the suppression of facts is a major issue in this country.... Christians, Muslims and Communists know how to write history and then how to rewrite it to suit their current ideological needs. When the Indian Express covertly supports one of these parties—in this case the Roman Catholics—in rewriting Indian history, the affair becomes a matter of grave concern to everybody.... The Roman Catholic Church is the richest, largest and most sophisticated private publisher in India and the world. But this is not enough for them. They need the name of a fair-minded and respected daily to give their lies ... credibility—and unfortunately for the people of Madras they have found this in the Indian Express.
Arun Shourie had written about historical evidence and those who conceal it in "Hideaway Communalism" in the Indian Express on 5 February 1989. In the context of the myth of St. Thomas, his questions could be directed at journalists and he could be defining the self-interest of Roman Catholic bishops. He asks, "Will we shed our evasions and concealments? Will we at last learn to speak and face the whole truth?... To see that these leaders are not interested in facts, not in religion ... but in power, in their personal power, and in that alone? That for them religion is but an instrument, an instrument which is so attractive because the cost of wielding it falls on others, on their followers, and not on them?"
In an earlier paragraph he could be writing about the editors of our national English language dailies when he says, "That is the significant thing; they have known [the evidence] and their impulse has been to conceal and bury rather than ascertain the truth."
Arun Shourie lost his job at the Indian Express because he told the truth. 7 And, what he wrote in 1989 in "Hideaway Communalism" is as true today (June 1994) at the Indian Express as when we quoted it in the first edition of this book in February 1991. C.P. Seshadri remains at his table vetting letters to the editor and S. Sapru, reportedly an economist, is the present resident editor. On 1 January 1994 they gave a prominent place to the following letter from S. Chandrasekaran of Cheyyar:
The Bible says, "After Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of Herod the King, behold, Wise Men from the East came to Jerusalem saying where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him. They saw the young child ... and fell down and worshipped Him ... they presented gifts to Him: gold, frankincense and myrrh.' (St. Matthew 2:1-11.)
Western scholars argue that the Wise Men were Persian Magi, the members of a priestly class or the magicians. However, they cite no evidence, probably not knowing that the more appropriate country in the East from where they proceeded to Bethlehem should be India.
The Wise Men were definitely the brilliant astronomers of India.
Among the eastern countries only in India Wise Men were found with astronomical talents. Also, the availability of gifts presented by the Wise Men to infant Jesus is abundant in India and not Persia.
The last but not the least proof is that in corresponding to the onward march of Wise Men from India to Judea, within not less than half a century, St. Thomas a disciple of Jesus Christ, made a downward march from Judea, superseded Persia and reached India to sow the seed of Christianity.
The Wise Men who went to Bethlehem to see Jesus were in all probability Indians and not Persians or any others. Is there anything to counter this possibility?
This letter was obviously a plant, i.e., the covert dissemination of an idea, usually placed in a newspaper with the connivance of the editor. It was written by a mischief-maker or clever Christian propagandist-s. Chandrasekaran would prove to be a shameless negationist as well—and we replied to it that same day, as did K.V. Ramakrishna Rao. As our letters are long and repetitious of arguments already presented in this book, only the edited versions which appeared in the Indian Express on January 4th are reproduced here. We wrote:
Dr. Chandrasekaran may be right in his proposition that the three Wise men who went to Palestine to offer gifts to the infant Jesus were Indians (I.E. Jan. 1). But the onus lies on him to provide proofs for his thesis and not pretend that it stands proved until somebody comes along and refutes it.
Citing the legend of St. Thomas as a "last but not least proof" for the Wise Men's journey west, is unacceptable because there is no proof that St. Thomas came to India.
Dr. Chandrasekaran's letter, which is obviously a plant, is apparently part of the effort to establish this anti-Hindu fable as history.
And K.V. Ramakrishna Rao wrote:
One can't divine Dr. Chandrasekaran's purpose in writing the letter. It contains nothing but unhistorical legends and myths.
As the Christian era that we follow is itself unscientific, purely based on religious dogma, now historians have started using the notations B.C.E. and C.E. (Before Common Era and Common Era). The alleged visit of St. Thomas to India is another myth floated by vested Christian missionaries.
If Chandrasekaran's purpose for writing the letter couldn't be exactly divined, neither could the purpose of the Indian Express for publishing it. As we had started work on the revision of this book and were interested in understanding Indian Express editorial policy, we sent a letter to the resident editor S. Sapru, with a copy to C.P. Seshadri, on January 3rd:
I am working on a new edition of my book The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple, which is being reorganised and expanded. Letters and articles currently appearing in the Indian Express will be included in it under appropriate headings.
If you or Mr. Seshadri wish to explain to a concerned public your editorial policy regarding the selection and publication of Letters to the Editor, I would be happy to consider including your statement in the new edition.
I have been critical of your policies in the past and remain critical of them today (especially when you publish untruthful or provocative items and then refuse to publish rejoinders), nevertheless, I am taking this opportunity to say that I do think the Indian Express is the best of the English-language papers being published in the country today.
This letter was a mistake. Though we were sincere and had sent it in good faith, it is as much the nature of newspaper editors to exploit the trust of their readers as it is the nature of missionaries to exploit the trust of the helpless and weak, and we had unwittingly invited these editors to exploit not only their readers but their readers' children. Sapru and Seshadri replied to our letter by publishing a four-colour three-column feature on St. Thomas and related Christian historical items on their children's page on February 18th. The material was attributed to the 1992 edition of the Limca Book of Records and read:
FIRST TO PREACH CHRISTIANITY: Apostle St. Thomas (Thomas Didaemus) arrived in India in 52 A.D. by the northwestern route and preached Christianity until his death. He was the first to preach Christianity in India.
OLDEST CHURCH IN EXISTENCE: St. Thomas is believed to have established a small church at Mylapore in Madras in 52 A.D. where he was killed. Today's Santhome Church reportedly stands near the earlier site.
FIRST CHRISTIAN COLONY: In 345 A.D. Thomas Cana, a Syrian merchant, came to Travancore and established a Christian colony.
FIRST JESUIT MISSIONARY: Saint Francis .i.Xavier;Xavier, a Spanish national who landed at Goa was the first Jesuit missionary. He established the first Christian colony in Goa in 1542.
FIRST JEWISH COLONY: In 68 A.D. 10,000 Jewish refugees emigrated from Jerusalem to the Malabar coast after the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem ...
The list continues with First Bishop and First Cardinal but we have reproduced the relevant items. Not one of them is historically true except for the reference to Thomas of Cana—which is also not proved. St. Thomas did not come to India and St. Francis Xavier did not establish the first Christian colony in Goa. When a history professor saw this article in the Indian Express he remarked, "The Limca Book of Records is the Coca-Cola Book of Lies—Limca being a trademark of Coca-Cola."
We did not respond to this feature. By taking the St. Thomas controversy to the children's page, the Indian Express had effectively put an end to any further debate. They had done this for exactly the same reason that The Hindu had done so earlier (as will be seen in the next chapter). First, nobody can take issue with articles that appear on the children's page; and second, the editors were showing their contempt for our position and ridiculing the plea that we had made in the first edition of this book-that the true history of old Mylapore be studied by unbiased professionals and recorded for our children.
But if the Indian Express did not hear from us again on the subject of St. Thomas, they too did not refrain from further promoting the legend at a given opportunity. On April 25th another feature on St. Thomas appeared above a large photo of some Kerala-style tiled roofs with loud-speakers attached to the eaves. It was by Samson Aseervatham of Nagercoil who wrote:
For a church it is tiny. But it has a "halo' of its own as it is considered the oldest church in the East. The 45 ft. by 10 ft. church was erected by St. Thomas, one of the twelve followers of Christ, at Thiruvithancodu.
The Apostle is said to have landed in A.D. 52 at Kodungallur on the west coast of South India.
St. Thomas raised seven and a "half' churches on the west coast before his departure to Mylapore, Madras. The Thiruvithancodu church, which has the original base and structure intact, is considered as being "half" because of its size.
The other seven churches are in Kerala: Malayankara, Parur, Palayur, Gokamangalam, Niranam, Chayel and Kurakonikollam. Of this, only the Niranam church is extant.
All the churches that St. Thomas built were dedicated to St. Mary. The one in Thiruvithancodu was raised on twenty cents of land given as a gift by the King of Venad. Thiruvithancodu was the capital then. It later expanded its territory and came to be known as Travancore.
The church was built entirely with neatly dressed rocks, and resembles a village temple. The tiled roof is a much later addition.
On Sundays, Syrian Christians throng here for worship. Prayers are recited in Syriac and Malayalam. The ancient church is under the direct control of the Catholic Orthodox Syrian Church at Kottayam.
K.V. Ramakrishna Rao's comment on this piece was published in the Indian Express on May 2nd:
Except the structure, which is quite recent, all claims made about the so-called "half-church' of St. Thomas in the write-up "Small and beautiful" (I.E. April 25), are totally unhistorical.
Samson Aseervatham has every right to believe that St. Thomas came to India. Some believe that Jesus Christ preached in Benares and died in Kashmir. But there is no historical evidence for such myths floated by the Portuguese.
About the St. Thomas myth in India and his "seven and a half churches', T.K. Joseph, in his book Six St. Thomases of South India has shown how missionaries were engaged in spreading the myth by planting relics, forging documents and writing "histories' in their own way.
The fact is that all the churches mentioned by the writer were previously Hindu temples which were converted into churches. In fact, even today they are either situated in or around the temple premises.
In 1990 the Indian Express allegedly had no space in which to publish a reply to C.A. Simon's St. Thomas article. In 1994 it has found a surplus of space in which to publish articles promoting the St. Thomas story. Editor Sapru has said (I.E. Feb. 25) that "the ultimate lord and master of the newspapers is the market place . If this is so—and ethics no longer have any place in journalism and newspaper publishing—then who is paying for this space? Is it the Jesuits—who own the world's largest bank, the Bank of America, with branches in India—or the Church of Rome? And if nobody pays, is telling the same old lie over and over again really so profitable?"
Whatever the faults of the Indian Express today, it had an honourable beginning and still has some of the moral authority it acquired in the Freedom Movement. This is not true of The Hindu which was established with the sole objective of making money from the Raj. It was known as The Sapper prior to 1947—even the British-owned Mail was more nationalistic—and after the White Sahib went away it was called—and is still called—The Old Widow of Mount Road. Its formula for success is a studied, high-tech mediocrity-name and form and no content—and a faithful toeing of the Government line. It is class-conscious, casteist and fashionably anti-Hindu. Its moral response to any media-created national crisis—such as the demolition of an unauthorised building in Ayodhya—is to fill its columns with the lugubrious drivel of various popular Marxist professors. In short, The Hindu is self-righteous and boring unless one is looking for a suitable girl for a middle class boy with B.Com. and a Green Card.
This is not only our view. A Christian missionary and social activist from Kerala who charges that Hindu civilization is exhausted and decadent, points a finger at The Hindu as a living example of this alleged condition. He says that we don't have to worry about Christian missionaries undermining Hindu culture when we have established opinion-setters like this at work in our midst.
All this by way of introduction to a hallowed Madras institution. We were quiet innocent of its ways when we sent a copy of the St. Thomas myth book to The Hindu in 1991. At the same time we sent a copy to Dr. T. Edmunds of T.B.M. Lutheran College at Porayar, Tamil Nadu. He replied and suggested that we ask The Hindu to let him do the review. We agreed, happy that a professional historian had taken an interest in the book, and wrote The Hindu book editor on April 3rd:
Some days ago I sent you a copy of The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple for review.
A copy of the book was also sent to Dr. T. Edmunds at the T.B.M. Lutheran College at Porayar 609307. He has just replied and suggests that I request you to allow him to review the book for The Hindu.
I do not know Dr. Edmunds but suspect that he may be the competent person to do the review, and therefore request that you consider contacting him for it.
This letter was replied to by 'special correspondent' C.V. Gopalakrishnan on April 6th:
This is in reply to your letter of April 3rd, regarding review of The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple.
The decision to review books sent to The Hindu and the choice of the reviewer rest with the Editor.
This letter was unexpected and unnecessary. We had only made a suggestion which may or may not be followed up. It did indicate though that the editor did not want the review. We would learn soon enough that the book page editor was C.V. Gopalakrishnan himself.
But if his note was unexpected, what was to follow a week later was a real surprise. On April 13th The Hindu published a four-colour seven-panel cartoon feature on its children's page called 'The Story of Madras'. It was illustrated by Lalitha and scripted by a director of the newspaper, Nandita Krishna, who wrote:
Mylapore had several famous foreign visitors. Let us see who they were.
One of the minor apostles of Jesus Christ, Thomas Dydimus (or St. Thomas) preached the Gospel on the beaches of ancient Mylapore in the 1st century A.D. It is believed that he was buried here in A.D. 72.
Marco Polo visited St. Thomas' church and tomb in "ancient Meliapore' in 1293.
The Arabs visited Betumah ("the Town of Thomas") in the 9th century and the Nestorian Christians in the 10th century. The latter built a church over St. Thomas" tomb. In the 16th century, the Portuguese shifted the tomb and built a basilica—San Thome Cathedral—at the present site.
But St. Thomas did not live in Mylapore. It is believed that he lived in a cave at Little Mount, prayed and preached here, and took a daily walk to the beach at Mylapore ...
And died on St. Thomas Mount, where the Nestorians built a church which the Portuguese re-built and to which the Armenians made additions.
The church contains a painting of the Virgin Mary, said to have been the work of St. Luke, who gave it to St. Thomas to bring to Madras.
In the 16th century, the competition between the Portuguese and the Dutch to secure a port in Chola Mandalam, a province of the Vijayanagar Kingdom, and today"s Madras, sent the price of pepper up by 5 shillings. So 24 merchants in London started a trading company, the East India Company, to corner the Indian trade. The action was to change the course of Indian history.
Except for the last reference to the East India Company, none of these statements are true—or wholly true, for the feature is a most deceitful mixture of fact and fiction. And because it appeared on the children's page when we had made a specific and sincere appeal that our children be told the plain truth about Mylapore, we felt that the editors of The Hindu—be they Kasturi or Ravi or Ram in 1991—and Nandita Krishna were simply being spiteful. We decided to let them know that we knew what they were about and sent a letter to the editor on April 20th:
Apropos of the colour feature about St. Thomas (Young World, April 13), I am reminded of Mark Twain's observation that "a lie can travel half-way around the world before truth can put its trousers on."
My book about the myth of St. Thomas was sent to you in good faith, with the hope that it would receive fair treatment at the hands of a competent reviewer of your choice, and I must confess that I did not expect from The Hindu the spiteful response that this feature by Nandita Krishna represents.
Special correspondent C.V. Gopalakrishnan kept quiet this time and did not reply to us.
Nandita Krishna was not only being spiteful of course. She was declaring the policy of her newspaper—which appears to be the wholesale revision of Indian history 1 in order to extract yet more money out of a gullible middle class with the marketable commodity of 'Hindu tolerance (which is falsely presented as being Hinduism's essence). 2 That she should publish in her paper at all raises a serious question of ethics. Directors and publishers should not write in their own newspapers. This is an old, old rule. But perhaps most unfortunate of all is that The Hindu editors have shown themselves to be opportunists, a charge levelled at journalists because they often take undue advantage of a given circumstance when looking for the good chance. 3 Indeed, Jesus the twin brother of St. Thomas warns us against these pretentious, greedy scribes when he says in Mark 12:38-40:
Beware of the scribes, which love to go in long clothing, and love salutations in the marketplaces, and the chief seats in the synagogues, and the uppermost rooms at feasts: which devour widow's houses, and for a pretense make long prayers: these shall receive greater damnation.
Madras has two major English-language dailies, The Hindu and Indian Express, and a growing number of special interest community journals. The best known of these small publications is Madras Musings, a Catholic-owned fortnightly published by Anu Varghese and edited by S. Muthiah. Muthiah is a Sri Lanka-returned journalist who is described in an Indian Express article as talented and multi-faceted. He is certainly these-and more as will be seen. He is also reportedly multi-religious, though only the Catholic side of his faith shows. He is a committed and subtle promoter of the St. Thomas fable, which he repeats at length in his books Madras Discovered and Madras Rediscovered, and a zealous patron of the City's Portuguese churches.
We did not know any of these wonderful things when we sent him a copy of the first edition of this book for review. Madras Musings reviewed books then-early 1992—and had the motto 'We care for Madras' blazoned across its masthead, and we thought—rather naively we would soon learn- that knowing about Madras was also caring for it.
Sometime later, in the May 1-15 issue, a prominent, boxed, front page editorial appeared in the paper. It was obviously written by Muthiah himself though it appeared with the byline 'Staff Reporter'. It was called 'Looking back—for action tomorrow' and read:
In all the excitement to draw up plans to make a heritage zone of Mylapore-San Thome, only one thing is certain. And that is that the area, ancient Mylapore, which was pushed far from shore by the Portuguese after 1522 to create San Thome, and the new Mylapore, that developed where it is today through the efforts of the Vijayanagar "governors' of this part of Tondaimandalam, has the strongest historical reasons for conservation efforts to be spent on it.
Tamil tradition has Mylapore as over 2500 years old. Thiruvalluvar, it is said, lived and sang here. Christian tradition, as much an article of faith, has Thomas who Doubted, the Apostle of India, living and preaching in this part of the Coromandel from about 65 A.D. till his death in 72 A.D. Today, there is much associated with that legend that survives between the Mylapore beach and the Mount of St. Thomas.
Ptolemy the Greek geographer wrote of the great port of Maillarpha about 140 A.D. From the 6th to the 8th centuries, this was the chief port of the Pallavas of Kanchi and it was from here that the culture of India first spread to the lands of the east. It was to this great port that the Arabs and the Nestorians and Marco Polo came at different times, from the Pallava period to the 13th century. And it is Maila and Meilan and Mirapor they all also called Betumah, "The Town of Thomas'. 1
After the Pallavas, the prosperity of Mylapore declined and it was little more than a small town when the Portuguese established their settlement in its place and pushed it back from the shore. 2 But of it Camoens, the author of the national epic of the Portuguese, The Lusiads (1572) sang:
Here rose the potent city Meliapor Named, in olden time rich, vast and grand...
A lineage as ancient as that, a town associated with Thiruvalluvar and Thomas, the Pallavas and the Portuguese, certainly deserves its heritage protected. But to find common consent of what that heritage is and all of what it should encompass will be the first hurdle to be crossed in any plan to "save' Mylapore.
Unfortunately, try as he might, Muthiah does not have a facet among his multi-facets that reflects any real feeling for a Mylapore other than the one the paranghi priests and pirates colonized and sang about at home. We replied to this editorial in Madras Musings on May 5th:
The legend of St. Thomas coming to Mylapore may be an article of faith for some Christian communities in India. It is not an article of faith for Rome and the unedifying fable is no longer taught in Catholic universities in Europe and America. Nor was it an article of faith for Bishop Stephen Neill, himself a man of faith, when he, in his authoritative History of Christianity in India: The Beginnings to 1707 A.D., lamented the spread of this spurious history about St. Thomas among Indians. 3
Equally important if not more so, the myth of St. Thomas is not an article of faith for the majority of citizens of Mylapore and Madras. It represents for them the destruction of the great Shiva temple on the Mylapore beach and the denigration of their religion by the Portuguese and the Roman Catholic Church. How can these citizens be expected to sympathize with the sordid heritage that San Thome represents? How can they be asked to assist with the preservation of the monuments that represent the success of this vicious attack on their faith?
This letter was not published of course, and in retrospect it is not reasonable to insist that it should have been. Madras Musings is a Catholic newspaper-for all of its non-sectarian face-and if The Hindu and Indian Express will not allow the truth about Mylapore to be told, we can hardly expect this fortnightly to be more honest.
The references to St. Thomas in India which follow were found in various national and international media over the last four years (1990 to 1994) and are produced here for the record. They are in chronological order and do not include items already discussed in this book.
This list is random and incomplete. It does not represent any kind of statistic but it does show that the St. Thomas legend is pervasive throughout the media for a variety of reasons.
The letters that follow were exchanged between the historian Sita Ram Goel and the journalist Khushwant Singh. They are self-explanatory. Sita Ram Goel wrote to Khushwant Singh on 3 December 1992:
I am writing to you with reference to your article, "The Divided House of Kerala," in The Sunday Observer of December 1-7, 1991. Among other things, you say that "In A.D. 52 St. Thomas, one of the 12 apostles, arrived in northern Malabar and succeeded in converting some Namboodiri Brahmins and Nairs."
I draw your attention to a hot controversy which is presently raging in the South regarding the role of the St. Thomas myth. A clipping from the Organiser dated 7.11.91 is enclosed.4 It shows what use the Christian theologians are making of the myth, and how Hindu scholars have started reacting to it.
Leading Christian historians have doubted whether a man like St. Thomas ever existed in history. Even those who accept his existence are positive that he never came to India. The whole subject has been discussed in detail in our publication, The Myth of St. Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple, a copy of which I am forwarding to you by separate post.
I hope you will spend some time to study the story. We should be able to stand on firm ground so far as facts are concerned unless we want to vindicate Bernard Shaw who said that journalists have a vested interest in ignorance.
Khushwant Singh replied to this letter on December 6th:
Thanks for your letter and the clipping which I have read. And the booklet which I will read. You pronounce as facts what suits your pre-thinking. What are the 'facts' about the Ayodhya dispute all only known to historians who don't seem to agree on any of them.
Sita Ram Goel replied to this missive on December 9th:
Thanks for your postcard of the 6th.
The sentence, "You pronounce as facts what suits your pre-thinking," is not quite clear to me. Have we cited facts which are not facts? Or are there facts which we have not taken into account? In both cases, we wait for the other side to come out with evidence. So far we have waited in vain.
I have studied the sources and can say with full responsibility that St. Thomas visiting India is as much true as Jesus spending his early years in a Tibetan monastery. People in highest places have repeated the story without caring to check the sources. But repetition does not make truth out of a lie.
About Ayodhya, I must say that our side has been completely ignored by the media. I am sending another publication, History versus Casuistry, which shows how the VHP scholars presented solid evidence, and how the AIBMAC ran away from the conference convened by the Chandra Shekhar Government. Kindly find out for yourself if the AIBMAC has published the "evidence" they presented.
T.T. Krishnamachari was a Sunlight soap salesman who made a lot of money from the Raj, joined the Congress after independence, and somehow managed to become Nehru's finance minister. He is a success story in Madras and has a road named after him in Teynampet--T.T.K. Salai. His sons now preside over a business empire that includes pharmaceuticals, health care, travel, textiles, pressure cookers, condoms, road maps and Catholic propaganda. It is the Catholic propaganda that concerns us here but we cannot ignore the presence of the condoms. Catholics are not supposed to wear condoms-at least they are not supposed to be seen wearing them-and we cannot imagine what the Archbishop of Madras and St. Thomas-who was ideologically against intercourse in the first place-think of their new patron and his disparate business interests. But to start our story at the beginning.
In the first edition of this book we made a reference to the 1985 edition of the T.T.K. A Map s Guide Book to Madras . We had quoted a line from it regarding the fate of the original Kapaleeswara Temple which was a piece of wrong information that had been subsequently quoted by another writer in the Indian Express. 1 We had also noted that, "This popular guidebook, like others of its kind, treats the legend of St. Thomas in Madras as accepted historical fact."
Now because we had made this observation and because we believed that the T.T.K. publisher was simply misinformed about the St. Thomas story'C everybody was misinformed about it we had discovered—we had sent him a copy of our book on the St. Thomas myth when it was released in early 1991.
This was done as a courtesy—and it was sincerely meant as a courtesy—and we had no reason to suspect that the T.T.K. publisher had any interest in repeating the St. Thomas fable in his publications in an unqualified manner if he knew better. We were mistaken. Big business obviously had contingencies and a code of ethics that we could not anticipate or appreciate. And we did not know then that the talented and multi-faceted S. Muthiah, the man who would become editor of Madras Musings and editorial advisor to other Madras newspapers, was a director, consultant and copywriter at T.T. Maps and Publications Ltd., the T.T.K. company that published the Madras guidebooks.
Muthiah is an informed and articulate local historian and-as we have already noted-a motivated promoter of the St. Thomas tale, and we, unwittingly and in good faith, had given him yet another opportunity to publish abroad-or advise his principal to publish abroad-the great Portuguese lie. The 1993 edition of the T.T.K. Road Guide to Madras is a masterpiece of disinformation. It has a large photograph of the San Thome Cathedral steeple and cross on its cover and a disingenuous commentary inside that presents the St. Thomas story straight across as Indian history, objectively and in detail. Obviously we had provoked this delinquent response from T.T. Maps and Publications Ltd. with our own St. Thomas book. The Kapaleeswara Temple entry, which had caught our attention in 1990, was now revised and gave the distinct impression that the temple had never been in any other place than it is today. This entry, like others, is a bundle of contradictions and appears to be a crude rewriting of S. Muthiah's own published Mylapore B San Thome histories.
Now as interesting as what is said in the T.T.K. guidebook, is what is not said. This trend of omission had started with Nandita Krishna's St. Thomas article in The Hindu and was copied later in the Indian Express. The new purveyors of the St. Thomas myth, all of them Hindus, are always careful to leave out the Brahmin assassin who stabbed the saint in the back while he was at prayer. This attempt to accommodate a vicious communal tale directed against themselves and their forefathers by cutting out the offending parts, is sad indeed and it has given the Catholic believer the last laugh. He knows that there is no martyred saint without an assassin- and he could only be a Hindu priest in 72 A.D.
We can only wonder at the ostrich-like posture of our intellectuals's heads in the sand and feathered bottoms stuck high in the air for everybody to see—and at their continued policy of self-abnegation and appeasement of an intolerant other side in order to keep the peace. We wonder indeed at their intellectual dishonesty. Big Church and big business are not going to change their unprincipled ways until Indian intellectuals themselves find the courage to tell the truth and continue to tell it even when first efforts appear to be counterproductive and overwhelmed by Catholic and commercial interests.
Madras, Sept. 22, 1991. Christian fanatics have sent a letter to Kanchi Kamakoti Shankaracharya Math, Kanchipuram, threatening to bomb the office of Kamakoti, a journal edited by T.S.V. Hari and published by T.V.S. Giri from Madras, if it does not stop a serial on the Hindu temples destroyed by Christians and converted into churches in the yesteryears. The journal has been publishing the serial based on authoritative historical sources and evidences produced by renowned research scholars. 2 Even The Vedanta Kesari, a monthly of Ramakrishna Math, published from Madras, had recently carried an article by no less a person than Swami Tapasyananda, Vice-President of the Math, pointing to evidences of the destruction of the ancient Kapaleeswara Temple which was converted into Santhome Church. 3 It is learnt that a copy of the threatening letter from fanatic Christians has been forwarded to the authorities for necessary action. The publisher of the journal, without commenting on the letter, told our correspondent that they do not intend to stop the serial succumbing to the threat.
1 This editor has been at the Madras office of the Indian Express for the last hundred years and has seen as many resident editors as he has years pass by his table going out the door. He vets all letters to the editor and decides on much of the material that appears in the Madras edition of the newspaper.
2 The title was changed to The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple. The article submitted to the Indian Express was called What the Historians Say About Saint Thomas.
3 Ramnathan had confused Tapasyananda with Jyotimayananda whose letter was published on February 10th. But the mistake reveals that he was aware of Swami Tapasyananda's article which had been sent to him three months earlier.
4 The footnote was deleted.
5 The Express Weekend editor S. Viswanathan eventually sent C.A. Simon's address by post.
6 We did not know at the time of writing this letter that Swami Tapasyananda's article had also been submitted to the Indian Express.
7 He is remembered in Madras with much affection and respect by Indian Express readers.
1 The Hindu is fully aware that the St. Thomas story is false and that the Kapaleeswara Temple was destroyed by the Portuguese in order to build San Thome Cathedral. We know this because some of the documents referred to when researching this book have come from The Hindu files.
2 Hinduism's essence is not tolerance but Ishwara, Dharma and Satya.
3 It is because journalism is so exploitive of people and events that the only redeeming feature of the profession is the moral obligation to tell the truth.
1 Only the Syrians identified Betumah with Mylapore. The Arabs said it was east of Cape Comorin, probably in Sumatra, and Gerini, in Researches on Ptolemy's Geography of East Asia , says it is east of Singapore. There is also no agreement among scholars as to the meaning of the word Betumah. On this point as on others, S. Muthiah, like Nandita Krishna in The Hindu, is simply trying to pass off one version or another of the St. Thomas fable as history.
2 All evidence points to Mylapore being a flourishing and wealthy Hindu pilgrimage city until the Portuguese destroyed it. S. Muthiah is following the Portuguese accounts here, which were specifically written to cover up the great destruction of the city.
3 The question of whether or not the St. Thomas legend is really an article of faith for Christians is discussed on pages 108 and 109 of this book.
1 See page 158 for reference.
1 Hindu Voice International, News and Feature Service of Sister Nivedita Academy, Madras.
2 The series began in June 1991 with an article on the St. Thomas myth and the destruction of the Kapaleeswara Temple by the Portuguese. It continued for three months with articles on St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Xavier and the destruction of temples in Madras, Chingleput and Arcot districts by Muslims. The source materials for the articles were Voice of India publications.
3 See "The Legend of a Slain Saint to Stain Hinduism" reproduced in this book.