indian Context

Indian Context

In the viewpoint of broader understanding the land INDIA can be introduced as follows:

"It is certainly not as small as the present political INDIA. As per the ancient historians and travelers, India is the farthest part of the inhibited world towards the east.

Political and Commercial context

From the time of invasion of Alexander the Great in 326 BC crossing the Indus river, India became more open to the countries of the west. He conquered King Poros (the king of present Punjab) historically and broke the great barrier, the empire of Persia which had separated people of western countries including Greece from India and opened a channel for direct communication. Eminent scholars of those times; Ptolemy, Aristobolus etc'. and others gives reference to it.

Point Of Topic !

The map extracted from the present world shows it better. Let us go into the pre-historic India for a while. To simplify further, It was a land mass and group of Islands which was east to Mediterranean and Europe with many hundreds of Kingdoms, countries, small countries, jungle mass, and no mans land."

After the death of Alexander, the great Indian king Chandraguptha Mourya liberated Punjab from Greek domination by a friendly alliance with the Seleukos Nicator. Owing to this better atmosphere, many Greek merchants and others were attracted to Indian subcontinent. They and their successors exchanged ambassadors and many other western kingdoms followed it such as Egyptian Ptolomies. Many of them like 'Megasthenes' wrote books and defined boundaries of Indian subcontinent in it.

Communication between the western world and India became less frequent preceded to the Christian era due to the rise of new Parathian Empire. It was for a short period and Roman empire raised and started developing trade and commerce with the precious goods of east. Again Parathian Empire raised in between and a toll was levied for trade to Rome. This forced Romans to find a sea route to the east - especially to India. This created a problem with the Arabs as they were loosing the importance. After a lot of conflicts and problems, the incidents favored Roman ambition to set sail for India. Hence about 0005 AD., Strabo could write : ' ……. I found that about 120 ships sail from 'Mycos-Hormos' to India.'

The Indian Kings like 'Pandyan' of Madurai have opened embassies in Rome and the trade was immense as the western world was a good market for Indian goods. India was in a flourishing stage during that period.

This should be the reason St. Thomas selected India as his mission field which was well known to Palestinians and there was all means of communication which was prevailing at that time.