"Do you not know that all of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life." — Romans 6:3–4
The Journey to Vadakkankulam
He arrived at the parish house of Vadakkankulam carrying De Lannoy's letter and the full weight of what he was asking for.
Vadakkankulam was approximately twenty kilometres from Nagercoil — a journey of real distance in 18th-century Travancore, through terrain that was familiar to a court official who had overseen the construction of forts and the movement of armies. It was not a difficult journey by the measures of the body. But it was a journey that took Neelakandan out of everything he had always known: the court, the rank, the legal protection of his caste, the world that had been his from birth. With each step toward Vadakkankulam he was walking away from that world, and he knew it.
The church to which he was walking was the Holy Family Church — a sacred place with deep roots in the Tamil Catholic tradition, built in 1685 by the great Jesuit missionary Arulanandar, known to the world as Blessed John de Britto, who had himself been martyred for the Faith in 1693 and beatified in 1853. It had been built upon a chapel long tended by the faithful of the region, and it stood as the centre of a living Catholic community in a part of India where the Faith had been planted at great cost and kept alive through generations of quiet, steady devotion.
The parish priest was Fr. Giovanni Battista Buttari, born near Rome on 22 February 1707. He had arrived in India in 1739, working first in Neyman and Kochi before being appointed to revitalise Vadakkankulam in 1741. In honouring the Tamil culture of the people he served, he had taken a Tamil name: Paranjothi Nathar — the Teacher of the Supreme Light. He had served the Holy Family Church from 1744, and he would serve it until 1750, when the consequences of what he was about to do for Neelakandan forced his departure.
He received De Lannoy's letter. He read it. And then he hesitated.
The Priest's Hesitation
Fr. Buttari's hesitation was not timidity. It was pastoral prudence of the most serious kind, and it deserves to be understood as such.
King Marthanda Varma had imposed severe penalties — imprisonment and execution — on high-ranking court officials who converted to Christianity. The Namboodhiri Brahmins, whose authority rested in large part on the maintenance of the caste system that Christianity dissolved wherever it took genuine root, had made their influence felt at the royal court. The king's anti-conversion law was not merely political. It was, in effect, a death sentence offered to anyone of Neelakandan's rank who did what Neelakandan was asking to do.
Fr. Buttari had seen what happened to converts who were not firmly rooted in the Faith before the pressure came. He had seen men profess conviction and then, when the cost arrived, recant — not from malice but from the human fragility that no priest who has spent years in the field of souls can afford to underestimate. He feared that if Neelakandan were baptised while still in royal service, still surrounded by the structures and the relationships and the social pressures of his old life, the first serious wave of persecution might sweep away what the water had planted before it had grown deep enough to hold.
He needed to know whether this man's conviction was real and durable. He needed to see, not just hear.
The Nine Months
What followed was nine months of instruction and examination — a catechumenate of the fullest and most demanding kind.
Fr. Buttari placed before Neelakandan the complete substance of the Catholic Faith: the nature of God as Trinity, the Incarnation and its meaning, the Passion and Resurrection, the Sacraments, the moral life of a Christian, the obligations of charity and justice and prayer that Christ lays upon those who receive His name. He studied the profound Tamil Catholic writings of Veeramamunivar — the great Jesuit missionary Constantine Beschi, known as Beschi Adigalar — whose Tamil works on the Faith were among the finest theological writing the region had produced, rooted simultaneously in the depth of the Catholic tradition and the beauty of Tamil literary form.
He was tested. Not by examination in the academic sense, but by the kinds of tests that reveal the character of a man rather than the contents of his memory: tests of patience, of consistency, of whether the conviction that burned in his words was matched by the life he was quietly living during the months of preparation. Fr. Buttari watched him. He spoke with those who knew him. He prayed, as every good priest prays over the souls committed to his care, asking God to show him what was actually there.
What he saw, month by month, was a conviction as firm as a nail driven into a tree. Neelakandan's faith, the priest came to understand, was not the enthusiasm of a man in the first flush of an idea. It was the settled, unshakeable certainty of a man who had found what he had been looking for his entire life and who was not going to let it go, whatever it cost him.
This took place, the records note, while Marthanda Varma was engaged in military operations at Kayankulam — which meant the king's attention was elsewhere and the immediate danger of discovery was, for the moment, slightly reduced. God provides even these small shelters for the work He intends to complete.
The Declaration
At some point during the nine months, Fr. Buttari told Neelakandan plainly what he was facing: not as a warning intended to discourage him, but as the honest pastoral duty of a priest who would not send a man into danger without being certain the man understood its full dimensions.
Neelakandan's response has been preserved.
"I am ready to endure crucifixion like Jesus willingly. All that I have — my possessions, my comforts, my friends, and my family — I am prepared to dedicate to God."
Fr. Buttari, who had seen a great deal of human nature in his years of mission work, was astonished. Not by the words — men sometimes speak bravely in the safety of a conversation that has not yet tested them — but by the quality of the man who spoke them. This was not bravado. This was not the performed courage of a man who needed the priest to think well of him. This was a man who had already counted the cost, inwardly and thoroughly, and had made his decision with open eyes and complete calm.
The priest baptised him.
14 May 1745
On 14 May 1745, at the Holy Family Church in Vadakkankulam, Neelakandan was baptised.
He was thirty-three years old — the age of Our Lord at His death on the Cross. The Church does not ask us to press significance onto every coincidence, but she does ask us to notice when God, who makes all things, arranges the details of a saint's story with a care that exceeds what chance can account for. A man baptised at thirty-three, who would die for the Faith at thirty-nine, receiving at the water the age at which the One he was following died for him.
His godfather was Gnanaprakasham, the sacristan — the Upadesiyar — of the parish. The man who stood with him at the font was not a great official of Church or state but a humble servant of the house of God: a fitting image of the community into which Neelakandan was being received, and of the new order of dignity that Baptism confers, in which the last are first and the servant is the greatest.
He received the name Devasahayam.
In Tamil, Devasahayam renders the Hebrew name Lazarus — El-azar, God has helped. It is the name of the man whom Jesus loved, who died and was buried, and whom Jesus stood before the tomb and wept for, and called by name out of death and into life: "Lazarus, come out." It is one of the most charged names in all of Scripture — the name of the man through whose resurrection Christ declared, in the most visible and undeniable way available to Him before His own Resurrection, that death is not the last word.
This was the name given to Neelakandan at the font. He was Lazarus — the man God helped, the man God called out of the tomb. The prophecy of his life and his death and his final emergence into the eternal life of the saints was written into the name he received at the moment he was born again in water and the Holy Spirit.
He also received teachings from a catechist in Pattapuram during this period, deepening the formation that Fr. Buttari had given him.
The First Sacraments
In the weeks and months that followed his baptism, Devasahayam received the full sacramental life of the Church that had been waiting for him.
Father Thommaso De Fonseca, parish priest of Kottar — St. Francis Xavier's Church, the great Jesuit mission church of the region — heard his first Confession and administered his first Holy Communion: the Body and Blood of Christ, received for the first time by a man who had longed for years, without knowing what he was longing for, to be fed at this table.
He received further guidance from Father Perririse, the priest at Padmanabhapuram, who had known Neelakandan from his years at the royal court and who now accompanied the newly baptised man in the early months of his Christian life.
He visited the churches of the region: the Vadakkankulam church, the Kottar Cathedral, the chapel within Udayagiri Fort where De Lannoy worshipped with his family. He participated in the Mass — the Holy Sacrifice that he now understood, from the inside, as the living continuation of what Christ had done on Calvary. He brought to each celebration the attentiveness of a man who has spent years in the outer courts of a temple he had never been permitted to enter and who has now, at last, been brought inside.
Bhargavi Ammal — His First Convert
He came home. And the first person he spoke to was his wife.
Bhargavi Ammal — the woman from the Meccodu family of Eraniel, the woman whose intelligence and virtue had made her the unanimous choice of those who knew both families, the woman who had been his companion through the losses and the searching and the long journey toward this baptism — received what her husband told her with the resistance that a woman deeply rooted in her ancestral faith might be expected to show.
She was not indifferent. She was not dismissive. She was a woman of genuine piety and genuine thought, and what her husband was telling her demanded a response of the same quality. She listened. She questioned. She pushed back, not from stubbornness but from the honest resistance of a mind that would not accept anything it had not tested.
And then, by the grace that God withholds from no one who seeks it honestly, she yielded.
She asked to be baptised.
She received the name Gnanapu Theresa — Gnanapu being the Tamil rendering of the name that points to wisdom and spiritual knowledge, Theresa in honour of the great Carmelite saint of Ávila whose interior life of prayer had itself been a kind of martyrdom freely chosen for love of God.
She was Devasahayam's first convert. She would be his companion in the apostolate that followed. She would be his faithful widow for fourteen years after his death, keeping his memory alive and serving the community he had built. She was not a footnote in her husband's story. She was one of its central figures, and the page this blog has dedicated to her life gives her the full treatment she deserves.
What Baptism Is
The Church teaches — and has always taught — that Baptism is not merely a ceremony of welcome or a public declaration of belief. It is a real death and a real resurrection. The man who goes under the water dies, in a real and theological sense: the old self, the self formed entirely by the flesh and the world and its patterns of sin and limitation, goes down into the water with Christ. The man who comes up from the water is new: born again, adopted as a son of the Father, made a member of the Body of Christ, filled with the Holy Spirit, destined for the life of heaven.
This is what happened to Neelakandan on 14 May 1745.
He went into the water as the man his world had made him: a Nair nobleman, a court official, a man of rank and honour and established position. He came out of the water as Devasahayam: a son of God, a member of the Body of Christ, a man whose citizenship was now primarily in a kingdom not of this world — and whose obligations, accordingly, had been permanently and irrevocably reordered.
He returned to the court. He resumed his duties. He performed them, as he always had, with complete fidelity and competence. But he was not the same man. And it would not be long before the difference became undeniable to everyone around him.
The new life had begun. The storm was already forming on the horizon.
➡ FR. GIOVANNI BATTISTA BUTTARI
➡ THE APOSTLE OF TRAVANCORE — His Life as a Christian Four years of witness. The Gospel preached across caste and rank. The anger that gathered. And the arrest that ended his freedom but not his mission.
