"You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God." — Ephesians 2:19
The Table He Sat At
The most radical thing Devasahayam did: he sat at table with everyone. He broke the caste boundary — publicly, persistently, daily — and by that act declared that the Kingdom of God recognises no hierarchy the social world has invented.
But who, exactly, was at that table?
Who were the Christians of Travancore in 1745, the year Devasahayam was baptised at Vadakkankulam? Who was the community he walked into? Who were the brothers and sisters in Christ he received at his table and whose tables he went to?
This matters. Not as a background detail for scholars, but as the living reality of what his witness meant. When we say that Devasahayam sat with the poor and the marginalised, we are speaking of actual people with actual histories — communities that had carried the Faith in this region for generations before he arrived, at great cost and in great joy, forming the living Body of Christ in the far south of India. He did not create a community. He joined one. And that community is worth knowing.
The Ancient Root: The St. Thomas Tradition
The Christian presence in South India does not begin with the European missionaries of the sixteenth century. It begins, by the most ancient and unbroken tradition of the region, with the Apostle Thomas himself.
St. Thomas the Apostle, according to the tradition preserved by every Christian community of South India across twenty centuries, landed on the Malabar Coast in 52 AD and evangelised the region that is today Kerala and the Tamil Nadu coast. He established communities of believers, ordained leaders, and finally suffered martyrdom near Madras — at the hill now called San Thome — in 72 AD.
The communities he founded — known as the Syrian Christians or Nasrani — survived and flourished. They maintained their own liturgical tradition, their own ecclesiastical discipline, their own bishops, and their own distinctive identity across more than fifteen centuries, without European contact, without papal oversight, embedded in the social fabric of Kerala society in a way that no later Christian community in India could claim.
By the 18th century, the Syrian Christian communities were concentrated primarily in central Kerala — the Malabar and Kottayam regions — rather than in the far south of Travancore where Devasahayam lived. But their existence was known. Their presence was part of the landscape that every Christian in Travancore inhabited. They were the deep root of South Indian Christianity, the evidence that the Faith had been in this land since the generation of the Apostles.
They are also, in one precise sense, the reason Devasahayam's canonisation is historically significant in a way that is easy to miss. The Syrian Christians had, over fifteen centuries, largely accommodated themselves to the caste system — they maintained their own caste identity, their own hierarchy of pure and impure within the Christian community, their own prohibitions on commensality across caste lines. They were Christians. They were also high-caste. They ate with their own kind.
Devasahayam did not. And the contrast matters.
The Parava People: The First Mass Conversions
The second great wave of Christianity in South India arrived in the sixteenth century, through the Jesuit missions — and its most spectacular chapter unfolded on exactly the coast where Devasahayam would later be baptised.
The Parava people — Paravar in Tamil — were a fishing and pearl-diving community of the Coromandel and Malabar coasts, concentrated along the stretch of sea between Tuticorin and Cape Comorin, in the waters where the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of Bengal converge. They were not low-caste in the simple sense: they had their own internal hierarchy, their own community identity, their own pride in the ancient skill of pearl-diving that had made this coast famous from Roman times. But in the Travancore social order they occupied a marginalised position — neither Brahmin nor Nair, outside the structures of power that governed the land-based kingdom.
In 1535–1537, the Parava communities entered into a mass conversion to Catholicism — not in isolation, but as a communal act, driven partly by the desire for Portuguese military protection against Arab pearl-trading rivals who threatened their livelihoods, and partly by the genuine work of God in hearts that had been prepared to receive the Gospel. Tens of thousands of Paravas were baptised.
Most of them, in the immediate aftermath, knew little of the Faith they had received. They had been baptised. They had been given Christian names. They were legally Catholics. But there was no one to teach them.
That was the situation that St. Francis Xavier arrived to in 1542.
Francis Xavier and the Foundation of the Mission
Francis Xavier landed at Goa in 1542 and almost immediately made his way to the Parava coast — the Fishery Coast, as the Portuguese called it, the stretch of shoreline from Tuticorin south to Cape Comorin and around into the Gulf of Mannar.
What he found there was a community of baptised Christians who knew almost nothing of the Faith they had received. What he did about it was one of the great missionary responses in the history of the Church.
He learned Tamil. Not fluently — his Tamil was imperfect and he acknowledged it — but enough to catechise, enough to preach, enough to teach children the prayers and the Creed and the Commandments in their own language. He walked from village to village along the coast, ringing a bell to call the people together, teaching them what he had written out in Tamil, baptising those who had not yet received the sacrament, hearing confessions, celebrating Mass. He was tireless. He covered hundreds of miles of coastline. He is said to have baptised more people in the south of India than any missionary in the Church's history.
He did not transform the Parava communities overnight. But he planted the Faith in them with the thoroughness and the love of a man who understood that what was being planted was a seed that would grow for centuries after he was gone. He built churches. He appointed catechists. He established the structure of parish life.
He established his headquarters at Kottar — the small town at the southernmost tip of India that would later give its name to the Cathedral where Devasahayam's body lies today. The great church of St. Francis Xavier at Kottar — the church that was the first in all the world to be dedicated to Xavier, before his canonisation, built on the ground where he had walked and preached — stands on the site of his mission.
When Devasahayam was arrested and paraded through the towns of Travancore and eventually martyred and his body brought to Kottar Cathedral, he was laid to rest in the church of the man who had planted the Faith in the communities he had spent four years preaching to and eating with.
There is a line from Xavier's Parava mission to Devasahayam's table that runs unbroken.
The Nadar Community: The Crucible of Suffering
The community most closely associated with Devasahayam's apostolate — the community whose tables he visited and who visited his — was the Nadar community, known in the 18th century by the name Shanar.
The Shanars were a caste of toddy-tappers and agricultural labourers who occupied one of the lowest positions in the Travancore social hierarchy. They were not Paraiahs — the technically Scheduled castes at the very base of the system — but they were close to the base, and the restrictions placed upon them were severe. They were not permitted to walk on roads that upper-caste people used. Their women were not permitted to cover their upper bodies in the presence of upper-caste men — a humiliation enforced with brutal consistency by the social and legal mechanisms of the kingdom. They were barred from temples. They were required to keep distances from those above them. They were, by the logic of the caste world, almost invisible.
They had been among the first communities outside the Paravas to receive the Faith in significant numbers, through the Jesuit missions of the seventeenth century. By 1745, there were substantial Catholic Shanar communities in the Kanyakumari district — particularly in the villages around Nagercoil, Vadakkankulam, and the coastal areas — who had maintained the Faith through generations of quiet, persistent devotion.
The Faith had given them something the caste system could not: the knowledge that they were made in the image of God, purchased by the Blood of Christ, equal before the altar of the Lord to every other human soul on the earth. The Creed did not distinguish between Namboodhiri and Shanar. The Eucharist was the same Body and Blood for every communicant. The prayer was heard by the same Father whether it came from the palace or the toddy-tapper's hut.
This knowledge — held in the face of a social order that systematically denied it — was the spiritual wealth of the Shanar Christian community. It was what they brought to the table. And it was what Devasahayam recognised when he sat with them: not charity extended downward, but the mutual recognition of people who had found, in the same Lord, the same dignity.
The Parish World of Vadakkankulam
The specific community at the centre of Devasahayam's Christian life was the parish of Holy Family Church, Vadakkankulam — the church where he was baptised, the church whose parish priest Fr. Buttari had been his instructor, the church whose community was his family in Christ.
This community had deep roots. The first Christians of Vadakkankulam traced their presence to the seventeenth century. The great Jesuit missionary and martyr John de Britto — Arulanandar — had established the first church in Vadakkankulam in 1685, building on the work of earlier missionaries who had evangelised the coastal and inland communities of the region. De Britto himself was martyred in 1693, less than twenty years before Devasahayam was born — and his martyrdom, and the community he had built, shaped the spiritual world into which Devasahayam was baptised.
The woman named Santhayi — the first Christian convert from Thoppuvilai — had settled in Vadakkankulam in 1680, five years before De Britto's church was built. She and the small community around her were the seed from which the Vadakkankulam parish grew. By 1745, when Devasahayam arrived at the parish house with De Lannoy's letter, there was a living, rooted, generationally established Christian community there — people who knew the prayers, kept the sacraments, raised their children in the Faith, and maintained their identity as Catholics in a kingdom whose ruler had made conversion punishable by death.
These were not passive recipients of Devasahayam's apostolate. They were the community that received him, formed him in the practical life of faith, and sustained him through the years of his apostolate. They were the brothers and sisters at the table.
The Cost of Faith in Travancore: Before Devasahayam
It is important to understand that Devasahayam did not inaugurate Christian suffering in Travancore. He inherited it.
The Christians of the Kanyakumari coast had been living with the threat of persecution for generations before his baptism. The Jesuit missionaries who served them had done so at great personal risk. John de Britto had been expelled, tortured, and ultimately beheaded in Oriyur in 1693 — not far from the region where Devasahayam would later be imprisoned. Fr. Buttari himself, who baptised Devasahayam in 1745, would be forced to flee the region in 1750 as a direct consequence of the persecution that Devasahayam's conversion had intensified.
The Christian communities of the Kanyakumari coast knew what faith cost. They had seen it. They had buried their martyrs. They had worshipped in hiding when they had to, in the open when they could. They had maintained their catechists and their parish structures under conditions that no European Catholic of the same century would have recognised as the ordinary conditions of Christian life.
When Devasahayam sat at table with these communities, he was not joining a comfortable social group. He was joining a people who had been paying for the Faith for generations and who would go on paying for it for generations more. He was joining a Church whose members knew, in their bones and in their family histories, that the table of the Lord was not safe — that it was costly, and that the cost was sometimes everything.
He fit perfectly into that company. He had always been paying, from the moment De Lannoy opened the Book of Job and he recognised the God who answers from the whirlwind. He continued paying, at the table and in the court and in the prison and on the mountain. He paid it all.
What He Gave Back to the Community
Devasahayam did not only receive from the Christian community of Travancore. He gave back to it something it had never had before.
He gave it a witness from the top.
The Christians of the Kanyakumari coast were, almost universally, drawn from the lower and marginalised castes — Paravas, Shanars, coastal communities without political power or social standing. Their faith was genuine, their devotion deep, their endurance extraordinary. But in the world of 18th-century Travancore, they were nobody. The Brahmin establishment dismissed them. The royal court ignored them. The social order treated their Christianity as a matter of no consequence — the religion of the low, the marginalised, the people who did not matter.
Devasahayam was a Namboothiri Brahmin. He was a palace official. He was a man the king trusted with armies and treasuries and the administration of temples. He was somebody — by every measure the Travancore social order offered, he was somebody.
And he chose them.
He chose their table. He chose their company. He chose their Lord. He stood, in the court and in the street and at the shared meal, alongside the people the world had said were beneath him — and by that choice declared that the world's judgment was wrong, that these people were not beneath him, that they were his brothers and his sisters, that the God who had found them had found him too.
This is what his apostolate gave back to the Christian community of Travancore. Not merely converts — though there were converts, families brought to the Faith by his witness. But something more fundamental: the public declaration, by a man of the highest standing, that the Faith these communities held was worth everything. Worth his standing. Worth his position. Worth his life.
He validated what they had known for generations and paid for with their tears and their blood: that the table of the Lord is the only table that matters, and that everyone who comes to it comes as an equal.
The Community That Kept His Memory
When Devasahayam was martyred on 14 January 1752, it was this community — the Catholic communities of the Kanyakumari coast, the Paravas and the Shanars and the parish families of Vadakkankulam and Kottar and Nattalam — who kept his memory alive.
Not the court. Not the Brahmin establishment. Not the historical record as written by the powerful. The ordinary faithful, who had known him, eaten with him, received his preaching, watched his arrest and his parade of shame and his three years of chains — they remembered. They kept his feast day on 14 January. They preserved his relics. They told the story to their children and their children's children, across 270 years, until the Church in Rome finally heard what they had always known and raised him to the altars of the world.
The canonisation of Devasahayam in 2022 was not a gift from the Church above to a community below. It was the Church's recognition of what the community had already known since 1752. He was theirs. He had sat at their table. He had preached their Lord with his body and paid for it with his blood. He was their saint long before Rome said so.
He still is.
"You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God." — Ephesians 2:19
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