WI: St. Thomas or followers converts Indian monarch?

What might be the effect on Indian history if Saint Thomas or one of his followers converts a ruler of nowadays Kerala to Christianity, in the style that rulers of Armenia, Ethiopia, etc. were converted? It's probably true that the stories of the conversion of those rulers by various saints are exaggerated and happened because of pragmatic reasons, but nothing is really stopping the Christians from converting an Indian ruler in particular in this time period.

Basically, what if *Kerala joins Ethiopia in terms of isolated Christian kingdoms?
 

Yun-shuno

Banned
What might be the effect on Indian history if Saint Thomas or one of his followers converts a ruler of nowadays Kerala to Christianity, in the style that rulers of Armenia, Ethiopia, etc. were converted? It's probably true that the stories of the conversion of those rulers by various saints are exaggerated and happened because of pragmatic reasons, but nothing is really stopping the Christians from converting an Indian ruler in particular in this time period.

Basically, what if *Kerala joins Ethiopia in terms of isolated Christian kingdoms?
There is still a surviving population of Thomasian Christians in south India today. Christianity obviously is going to appeal to the downtrodden and oppressed castes. It's a shame it didn't spread more than it did in those days.
 
There is still a surviving population of Thomasian Christians in south India today. Christianity obviously is going to appeal to the downtrodden and oppressed castes. It's a shame it didn't spread more than it did in those days.

Not just a surviving population- we're a reasonable percentage of the population of Kerala.

Christianity interestingly didn't seem to appeal to the downtrodden and oppressed castes at the time. St Thomas Christians (known as Syrian Christians or Suriani in Kerala) were happily integrated into the local caste system (there's some evidence, from Syrian Christian church vocabulary, that a number of conversions came from Buddhists who were eager to find a way to preserve status in the face of resurgent Hindu states). By the second millennium AD, St Thomas Christians actually often served as an intermediary class between Hindu aristocrats and their Hindu serfs- since accepting taxes from the lower caste peasants would have been ritually polluting to the upper castes, they contracted out the taxes to Suriani tax farmers who, being regarded as upper caste in status could then pay the revenue to the aristocrats.

When the Portuguese came, they specifically did a lot of work among the lower castes which leads to an interesting social situation even in modern Kerala where the many groups of Syrian Christians are generally regarded as being of higher caste status than the Roman Catholics, and even Syrian Christians who accept Papal supremacy are careful to describe themselves as Syrian Catholic not Roman Catholic.
 
Now to answer the original question- this might be doable.

This seems to have been a time of religious turmoil in South India. Modern Hinduism still hadn't fully gained the upper hand over Buddhism and Jainism this far South. Perhaps the way is open for a local ruler to adopt Christianity and then dominate at least part of Kerala. I don't think it would be a very big polity (Kerala is cut off from the Deccan by the Western Ghats and begin long, thin and covered in rivers, doesn't make for a very promising unified polity, but maybe a merchant city like Muziris and it's hinterland would be doable.
 
And wasn't Kerala a major center of Indian Ocean trade? I wonder what effects this might have on Arabia, East Africa, and possibly elsewhere.
 
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