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The Swami Devananda Saraswati Interview with Rajeev Srinivasan
Swami Devananda (Ishwar Sharan) interview of August 26, 2001 (revised January 26,2003)URL http://hamsa.org/interview.htm
1. Can you tell me a little about your background? How long have you been inIndia? What prompted you to become a monk?
I was brought up in the foothills of western Canada. My family was middle class andGod-fearing and I was fed from birth on the strong meat of the Old Testament prophets.But in my early teens it was discovered that I did not love Jesus and was not afraid of Jehovah. I was excommunicated from my father’s small Protestant church. It was a veryliberating experience and I left home soon afterward.I began to read Buddhism and existential philosophy. Perhaps as a legacy of my earlyyears, I retained an avid interest in Christian history. I read Gore Vidal’s book 
 Julian
about the last pagan emperor of Rome. Julian became my hero along with Alexander theGreat. Julian was the great ascetic and Alexander the great king and traveler. I followedin Alexander’s footsteps, visiting as nearly as possible every place that he bad visited.I reached India in 1967 and immediately fell in love with Hindu civilization. It is the bestcivilization of the Great Mother Goddess. She is called Asherah in the Bible and the prophets are always cursing Her. As a small child I had seen Her once in a garden, andlater I had read about Her in the Golden Bough. She has always cared for me, and like thegreat guru Shankara I believe that She is the liberator of man and the revealer of truth. I became a sannyasi because of Her. It is a sacrifice of love that I am still trying to perfect.
2. What was your objective in writing
The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple?
You are quite critical of the Christian establishment and their fellowtravelers in the Indian media.
Most historians will tell you that St. Peter never went to Rome and did not establish aChristian church there. Yet the very authority of the papacy rests on this fiction and mosteducated people accept their claim. I was interested in the Indian parallel, in seeing whatthe historians had to say about the coming of St. Thomas to India and his establishing achurch in Kerala. I soon discovered that the most reputed historians of Christianityincluding Eusebius, von Harnack, de Tillemont, Latourette, Winternitz and. BishopStephen Neill, all denied the coming of St. Thomas to India. Some denied his veryexistence.In writing
The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple
(which I did under the ‘secular’ pen name Ishwar Sharan), I also wanted to show that there was a carefullyorchestrated cover-up in the Indian English-language media regarding the St. Thomasstory. Indeed, even after two editions of the book, The Indian Express and The New
 
Indian Express remain the main purveyors of the fable through editorials and their columnists A.J. Philip and Renuka Narayanan. Little leftist magazines like The IndianReview of Books, edited by the St. Thomas advocate S. Muthiah, also put in a good wordfor St. Thomas when the opportunity arises. This is their unprofessional response to theexposure of a fraud that does not serve their financial interests.Yet in writing the book and giving the source material for the legend, the 3rd centurySyrian religious romance called the
 Acts of Thomas
, my sincere hope was that Indianscholars would take up the study of the legend seriously. But this has not happened.Indian historians with their Marxist bent of mind are not willing to touch it. They areafraid for their tenures and their politically correct professional reputations. For theEnglish-language newspaper editors, all of them brown sahibs with brown noses, the St.Thomas fable is a useful stick to bash Hindus with when the occasion arises, as the storyis a vicious blood libel against the Hindu community.
3. You allege that there is, in effect, a conspiracy of silence to hide a lot of uncomfortable facts about Christianity in India. Why?
The establishment of the Christian church in India was intrinsically part of the Europeancolonial enterprise. Its history is shocking for its violence and duplicity. Read the lettersof St. Francis Xavier or the diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai.The Indian church today is not so much different from the original 17th century church. Itis very wealthy and corrupt and politically ambitious. But it has learned the propagandavalue of social service and is making a great effort to disassociate itself from its colonialorigins. This involves a lot of deceit, of course, and a massive cover-up of past deeds. Butas the late Archbishop Arulappa of Madras would say, the end justifies the means — even if that is not exactly what Jesus taught.The Christian church uses the St. Thomas legend to claim a 1st century origin for Christianity in India. It also claims St. Thomas to be a martyr at the hands of a wickedHindu priest and king. Better still, Christianity becomes the ‘original’ Indian religion, asit would be older than many of the sectarian Hindu cults practiced in the country today.The whole idea is a gross perversion of truth and a grave injustice to the Hinducommunity that has offered refuge to persecuted Christian refugees down through theages. It is Hindus who have been martyred by these same Christian refugees starting inthe 8th and 9th centuries when Syrian and Persian immigrants in Malabar destroyedtemples to build their St. Thomas churches. It is Hindus who were martyred in Goa byCatholic inquisitors and in Madras by Jesuit, Franciscan, and Dominican priests whooperated under the protection of the Portuguese. And it is Hindus who are martyred today by the Christian churches and the secular press who support them, including the BBC— all of whom have mounted a base campaign of vilification and calumny against Hindureligion and society.
 
4. You make the startling revelation that the fondly believed story of St. Thomas, anapostle of Christ, coming to India and establishing an Indian church, is a convenientfiction. What was the original rationale for this story? Who propagated it? Whathas been the consequence?
The original rationale for the St. Thomas story was to give the first 4th century Christianimmigrants in Malabar a local patron saint. The story also gave them caste status that wasimportant in integrating them into Hindu society. There is nothing unusual in a refugeecommunity creating this kind of mythology of identity and it is part of the process of getting established in a new land.The St. Thomas legend, which they brought with them from Syria, was easy enough toadapt to India. St. Thomas was already the patron saint of “India”, “India” being not thesubcontinent that we know but a synonym for Asia and all those lands that lay east of theRoman Empire’s borders. ‘India’ even included Egypt and Ethiopia in some geographies,and China and Japan in others.The Syrian Christian refugees had been led to India by a merchant who is known tohistory as Thomas of Cana, i.e. Canaan, but is also known as Thomas of Jerusalem. Over time it was natural enough for the Syrian Christian community to identify their 1stcentury patron saint Thomas the Apostle with their 4th century leader Thomas of Cana.As a result of this process it is now mistakenly accepted by most educated Indians that St.Thomas came to India in 52 CE and established a Christian church at Cranganore inKerala.
5. The great Kapaleeswar Temple in Mylapore, Madras, was demolished, accordingto you, and that is where the San Thome Cathedral now stands. This is news tomany people who believe temple demolition was largely a Muslim act.
The evidence for the demolition of the original Kapaleeswar Temple is according to avariety of sources including government records and archaeological reports. There is the presence of temple rubble in the San Thome Cathedral walls and in the grounds of Bishop’s House (removed since my book’s publication). The news of the demolition of the original temple was not news to anybody of a past generation and was discussed inthe Madras newspapers during British times. The origins of the present Kapaleeswar Temple are recorded and directly reflect and confirm the destruction of the originaltemple.It is true that Hindus do not associate temple breaking with Christians. That is due to thesuccess of the historical cover-up of which the ASI and the state archaeologicaldepartments are partly responsible. But we in the West know better about Christianhistory and have access to a vast stock of published material that is not usually availablein India. We know that every great pagan temple in Europe and the Mediterranean basinwas destroyed and replaced with a church after Christianity gained political ascendancyin the Roman Empire. We also know that it is not any different in India today where
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