Nowhere, for instance, has Christianity made more converts of recent years, perhaps because in Southern India there may still be found indigenous Christian communities which trace their origin back to the first centuries of the Christian era.

Even if there be no historical foundation for the tradition that it was St.Thomas the Apostle who himself first evangelized Southern India, and was ultimately martyred at St.Thomas's Mount near Madras, there is good authority for believing that Christianity was imported not many centuries later into Southern India by the Nestorian or Chaldaean missionaries from Persia and Mesopotamia, whose apostolic zeal ranged all over Asia, even into Tibet and Tartary.
According to the Saxon chronicle, our own King Alfred sent alms to India in 883 for St.Thomas and St.Bartholomew, and at that date there certainly existed, besides some small Christian communities on the Coromandel coast, two flourishing communities on the Malabar coast, where the so-called Syrian Church has maintained itself to the present day.

Another curious and perhaps equally ancient link with the West may still be seen to survive to-day in the small community of white Jews at Cochin, which, according to their own tradition, was founded when their forefathers were driven out of Palestine after the destruction of the second Temple.

To the charter which they still have in their possession, inscribed, like most west coast title deeds, on copper plates, the date assigned by the best authorities is about 700 A.D., and the powers and privileges which were specifically conferred upon their ancestors show that at that period already they had acquired in a remarkable degree the confidence and friendship of the Hindu Kings of Malabar.

The decline of both Christian and Jewish communities seems to have begun, indeed, with the appearance of the first Portuguese invaders from Europe, whose incursions destroyed the peace and tolerance which Christian and Jew had enjoyed in the days of undisturbed Hindu rule.
To what period the subjection of the old Dravidian stock to the superior civilization of the Aryans dates back, or in what manner it was continued, there is little as yet to show.