Sub-post under: ARREST, TORTURE AND IMPRISONMENT — 1749–1752
"I bear on my body the marks of Jesus." — Galatians 6:17
The Number That Was Kept
Thirty-two.
It is a specific number. Not "many wounds" or "severe injuries" or the kind of vague approximation that a man might use when he is overwhelmed by what he is witnessing and reaches for a general word to cover a particular reality he cannot fully bear to name. Thirty-two. Counted. Recorded. Preserved.
The fact that Fr. Buttari counted them tells you something essential about the man: he was a priest who understood that what was being done to Devasahayam was not merely suffering but testimony, not merely cruelty but evidence, not merely the injury of one man's body but the marks of a martyrdom in progress — and that evidence, once lost, cannot be recovered.
He counted the wounds. He wrote the number down. He kept the record.
The Church, three centuries later, read that record as part of the formal cause of canonisation. The thirty-two wounds documented by Buttari are among the primary historical witnesses to the truth that Devasahayam did not simply die — he was killed, systematically, over years, for a specific reason: because he was a Catholic and he would not stop being one.
Thirty-two is the number. But each wound was a decision — his captors' decision to inflict it, and his decision not to buy his freedom by denying the Faith that had cost him everything and given him everything. Every wound is a refusal. Every wound is a yes to God.
The Context of the Torture
To understand the wounds, you must understand what was being attempted.
Devasahayam's captors were not simply punishing him. Punishment is inflicted after the fact, in response to something already done, as a consequence and a deterrent. What was being done to Devasahayam was something different: it was coercion. It was the systematic application of pain to a living human body with the specific goal of breaking the will behind it — of making the pain so continuous and so severe that the man being hurt would eventually choose relief over faith.
The offer was always there. It was there from the first day of his arrest and it was there on every day of his three years of imprisonment. It was simple: deny the Faith. Return to your former life. Abjure the God you have chosen and return to the gods you were born to, and the pain will stop and your position and your honour and your comfort will be restored to you. The door is open. Walk through it.
He did not walk through it.
And so the pain continued. The wounds accumulated. The body that had been strong — the body of a man trained in the martial arts, the body of a palace official of vigour and capability — was systematically reduced, wound by wound and month by month, to what the sources describe at the time of the last visit: a man who could barely walk, whose flesh was wasted, whose thirty-two wounds bore witness to three years of refusing to make the one choice that would have ended it.
What the Wounds Were
The sources do not give us a clinical inventory of Devasahayam's injuries — Buttari was a priest, not a physician, and the documentation he preserved reflects what a pastoral visitor could observe and record. But the broader tradition of the sources and the oral history of the Kanyakumari communities gives us enough to understand what those years of imprisonment and torture involved.
Exposure: He was tied to a Puvarasu tree — a Portia tree — at the customs post near the Aralvaimozhi fort, bound in place, fully exposed to the sun and rain through the long months of the Tamil Nadu seasons. The sun of south India in the dry months is not a mild inconvenience. It is a physical assault: skin burning, dehydration advancing, the body's resources being consumed simply by the effort of surviving the heat without shade or adequate water.
Deprivation: He was given inadequate food and water — systematically, deliberately, not as an oversight of supply but as a method of coercion. A body deprived of adequate nourishment weakens; a weakening body is easier to break; a breaking body, the theory of his captors ran, would eventually take its will down with it. The theory was wrong. Devasahayam declined the fort's medical treatment when it was offered — "I am a sacrificial goat awaiting slaughter," he said — but the deprivation itself was not his choice. It was inflicted.
The chains: His legs were chained. Movement was constrained. The chains themselves, worn continuously over months and years, produce their own injuries: the skin beneath the iron, broken and infected; the gait altered; the body's circulation compromised. The chains are not a passive restraint. They are, over time, an active source of injury.
The direct wounds: What Buttari counted as thirty-two wounds included the injuries inflicted directly on his body through the course of his imprisonment — the beatings, the specific torments applied to a man whose captors had both the authority and the intention to hurt him as severely as was necessary to make him recant. The tradition of the martyrologies does not flinch from these: the blows, the instruments, the deliberate application of pain to a body that its captors had decided was an object to be broken rather than a person to be respected.
Thirty-two. Over three years. Each one a wound that did not break him.
The Comparison the Church Makes
The Church does not ask us to compare Devasahayam's wounds to the wounds of Christ in a way that equates the two — Christ's wounds are unique, unrepeatable, redemptive in themselves in a way that no martyr's wounds can be, because Christ's wounds are God's wounds, and God's wounds accomplished what no human suffering can accomplish alone.
But the Church does invite us to see, in the wounds of the martyrs, a participation in and a configuration to the wounds of Christ — a sharing in the pattern of the Passion that is itself a form of union with the crucified Lord.
Saint Paul understood this from his own body: "I bear on my body the marks of Jesus" (Galatians 6:17). The Greek word he uses — stigmata, marks — is the word for the brands or marks placed on a slave or a soldier to indicate whose they are. Paul is saying: I am marked as belonging to Christ. My body carries the evidence of whose I am. The beatings and the imprisonments and the shipwrecks and the stonings that have left their traces on his flesh are not merely the record of his sufferings — they are the visible sign of his belonging.
Devasahayam's thirty-two wounds are, in this Pauline sense, the marks of Jesus on his body. Each wound is evidence of whose he was. Each wound is the body's own declaration — written in blood and pain rather than words — that this man belonged to Christ and would not be purchased back from Him at any price his captors cared to name.
This is why Buttari counted them. Not out of morbid curiosity or clinical detachment. Because he understood that the wounds were themselves a kind of testimony — the body bearing witness to what the will had decided, the flesh confirming what the soul had already given.
"I Am a Sacrificial Goat Awaiting Slaughter"
When the medical facility of the Aralvaimozhi fort offered him treatment — when the people responsible for his imprisonment offered, with whatever mixture of pragmatism and residual human decency, to address the wounds they had inflicted — Devasahayam refused.
His words, preserved in the tradition: "I am a sacrificial goat awaiting slaughter."
This is not the language of despair. It is the language of the liturgy. A sacrificial animal, in the traditions both of Israel and of Travancore, is not an animal selected for destruction because it is worthless. It is selected because it is unblemished — chosen for its quality, set apart for its purpose, given to God precisely because it is the best of what is offered. The sacrificial animal does not resist its purpose. It is given.
Devasahayam, in refusing treatment, was not refusing care out of pride or stubbornness or a misguided desire to accelerate his death. He was saying something theologically precise: I know what is happening here. I know what this is moving toward. I am not going to complicate the movement toward it by patching the body that is being prepared for its offering. I am the sacrifice. The sacrifice is being prepared. I accept the preparation.
This acceptance — the free, clear-eyed, theologically informed acceptance of a man who knows he is dying and chooses to die in the manner and for the reason that God has placed before him — is what the Church calls the voluntas martyrii: the will of martyrdom. It is one of the elements the Church examines in the cause of a martyr: not merely that the person was killed, but that they chose, freely, to accept death rather than deny the Faith. Devasahayam's refusal of treatment is one of the clearest expressions of that will in the entire record of his martyrdom.
He was not dragged to his death. He walked toward it — slowly, in chains, with thirty-two wounds on his body — with the freedom of a man who had decided that this was what his life was for.
The Three Communions
In three years of imprisonment, Devasahayam received Holy Communion three times.
Three times, Fr. Buttari — and later another priest — made the journey to the prison, negotiated or evaded the guards, and brought the Body of Christ to the man in chains. Three times, in three years, Devasahayam received what the Church calls viaticum in its fullest sense: the food for the journey, the Bread of Life given to a man whose journey was leading him toward death.
Three in three years. The poverty of this is itself a witness. A Catholic in ordinary circumstances receives the Eucharist weekly, daily, as the ordinary nourishment of the Christian life. Devasahayam received it three times in three years. Each reception was therefore not the ordinary nourishment of the Christian life but something more acute — the concentrated gift of the Real Presence of Christ to a man who had nothing else, in circumstances where everything else had been taken, received with the attention and the hunger of a man for whom this was not routine but rescue.
The Church records these three Communions because they matter. They matter as evidence of pastoral fidelity — Buttari's willingness to take the risk of the prison visits. They matter as evidence of Devasahayam's continued practice of the Faith under imprisonment — he did not merely endure; he continued to receive the sacraments as best he could in the circumstances of his confinement. And they matter as the visible sign of the invisible reality: that in those three years of chains and wounds and deprivation, Devasahayam was not alone. Christ was present with him, in the most intimate and most literal sense the Church has ever found for that presence.
What the Wounds Meant to Those Who Saw Them
The crowds who gathered at Aralvaimozhi despite the guards — undeterred, the sources say, by the soldiers posted to prevent access — came because the fame of Devasahayam's witness had spread beyond the prison walls. They came because they had heard what was being done to him and what he was refusing to do in response, and the combination of those two facts was producing in the people who heard it something the guards had not anticipated and could not suppress.
They came to see a man choosing God over comfort, over safety, over his own body's relief. They came to see what that looked like in actual human flesh — not as an abstraction, not as a theological proposition, but as the visible, embodied reality of a man with thirty-two wounds who was still, in full possession of his faculties and his will, refusing to deny the God for whom he bore them.
It is one of the most powerful testimonies in the history of the Church's martyrology: that the wounds themselves became a form of preaching. That the body of a man being tortured into apostasy became, precisely because he would not apostatize, a proclamation of the Faith more powerful than any sermon. The guards could silence his words. They could not silence his wounds.
A voice at court warned Marthanda Varma: shedding the blood of a righteous man will stain the very fabric of Travancore's justice. The king's own advisers were being reached by what was happening in the prison. The deliberations about his execution were charged with the awareness that what was being done to this man was not producing the result it was designed to produce — and that the failure to produce that result was itself a kind of declaration.
He was not breaking. He was witnessing.
The Incorrupt Tongue
When Devasahayam's body was found — on the fifth day after his martyrdom, by the priests who searched the jungle where it had been cast — the sources record that his bones were found, and that among them was something unexpected: his tongue, incorrupt.
The tongue that had refused to deny Christ. The tongue that had preached the Gospel in the courts of Travancore and in the prison at Aralvaimozhi. The tongue that had spoken the words of the Our Father and the Creed in Tamil across four years of Christian life. The tongue that had, in the moments before the shot was fired, formed the last words: Yesu, rakshikkane — Jesus, save me.
That tongue, preserved intact in a body otherwise reduced to bones, was the relic that the faithful of Kanyakumari venerated from the moment of his burial. It is preserved today in the Cathedral of St. Francis Xavier at Kottar — the primary shrine of Saint Devasahayam, the first resting place of his body, the place where the Church in Kanyakumari has kept faith with his memory for nearly three centuries.
The incorruption of the tongue is not an accident. The Church, in her long tradition of reading the signs God gives through the bodies of His saints, has always understood incorruption as a sign — not a proof of sanctity in the juridical sense, not something the Church requires in the cause of canonisation, but a sign: God marking, in the body of His servant, the specific instrument through which that servant's witness was given.
Devasahayam's witness was given through his refusal — his refusal, sustained across three years and thirty-two wounds, to use his tongue to deny the God who had given it to him. The tongue that would not speak apostasy was preserved when the rest of the body had gone to dust.
Thirty-two wounds. And at the end, a tongue intact.
For Those Who Carry Their Own Wounds
Every person who reads this page carries wounds of some kind. Some are visible, some are not. Some were inflicted by others, some by circumstance, some by the simple fact of living in a world where suffering is real and loss is real and the body is fragile.
Devasahayam's wounds teach one specific thing that is worth holding: that wounds do not have the final word. The wounds were real — thirty-two of them, counted and recorded, inflicted over three years with the deliberate intention of breaking a man's will. They did not break it. The wounds multiplied; the will did not move. The body suffered; the soul remained free. The captors had the body; they never had the man.
This is not a promise that suffering will end quickly or that faith will prevent pain. Devasahayam's thirty-two wounds are evidence against that reading: the Faith did not protect his body. It freed his soul. And the freedom of his soul — the freedom that no wound could reach, the freedom that expressed itself in the refusal that each wound was designed to overcome — was the thing that outlasted the wounds, outlasted the prison, outlasted the soldiers and the king who ordered them and the whole apparatus of coercion that could not, in the end, reach what it was trying to reach.
Saint Devasahayam, you bore thirty-two wounds and did not deny the God who gave you life. Intercede for those who carry wounds today — wounds of body, of heart, of spirit — that they may find in your example the grace to bear what they carry without losing what cannot be taken from them.
Saint Devasahayam, pray for us.
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