Art

According to tradition, Thomas the Apostle arrived on the Malabar Coast in 52 AD, travelling along ancient maritime trade routes that connected India to the Persian Gulf. The communities he is believed to have founded came to be known as the Saint Thomas Christians or Nasranis.

And one of the most remarkable survivals of this early history is a granite cross discovered in 1547 at St. Thomas Mount in Chennai. Carved into hard charnockite stone, the cross bears inscriptions not in Latin or Greek, but in Pahlavi, a Middle Persian script used during the Sasanian Empire. This alone tells us something crucial. Indian Christianity was once deeply connected to the Persian Church of the East, long before European missionaries arrived.

The cross itself looks unlike what most of us associate with Christian imagery today. There is no body of Christ. Instead, the cross is empty, emphasising resurrection rather than suffering. It rises from a lotus flower, a powerful Indian symbol of purity and divinity, signalling how Christianity took root in local soil rather than replacing it. Above it descends a dove, representing the Holy Spirit, while floral arms and pearl-like buds speak of life, renewal, and the Tree of Life.

For centuries, the inscriptions puzzled scholars. It was only in the nineteenth century that they were identified as Pahlavi, linking the cross unmistakably to Persian Christian communities who travelled, traded, and settled along India’s coasts. One widely accepted reading even names the artisan or donor, a Persian Christian whose name survives only through this stone.

Local tradition also records something more mysterious. From the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, the cross was believed to have “sweated blood” during moments of prayer and the Eucharist. Portuguese chroniclers documented these events, and the cross came to be known as the Miraculous Cross of Mylapore. Whether read as miracle or metaphor, these stories reveal the intense devotion surrounding the relic.

Sources drawn from epigraphic and archaeological studies of the Saint Thomas Crosses of South India.

• Shah Umair.