This community, under the leadership of Thoma I, opposed the Padroado Jesuits as well as the Propaganda Carmelites following the Coonan Cross Oath of 1653, which was taken to resist Western Catholic influences.

In the documented period, the position was evidently hereditary, belonging to the Pakalomattam family, who claimed a privileged connection to Thomas the Apostle.

The Patriarch of the Church of the East Shemʿon IV Basidi responded by consecrating two bishops, Thoma and Yuhanon, and dispatching them to India.

[25] These bishops helped rebuild the ecclesiastical infrastructure and reestablish fraternal ties with the patriarchate, but the years of separation had greatly affected the structure of the Indian church.

Though receiving utmost respect, the metropolitan was treated as the spiritual authority in his own diocese; the Archdeacon was firmly established as the real power in the Malankara community.

Though prosperous owing to their large stake in the spice trade and protected by a formidable militia, the tumultuous political climate of the time had placed the small community under pressure from the forces of the powerful rajas of Calicut, Cochin, and the various smaller kingdoms in the area.

When the Portuguese under Vasco da Gama arrived on the South Indian coast, the leaders of the Saint Thomas community greeted them and proffered a formal alliance to their fellow Christians.

[27] The Portuguese, who had keen interest in implanting themselves in the spice trade and in expanding the domain of their bellicose form of Christianity, jumped at this opportunity.

[28] The Portuguese brought to India a particularly militant brand of Christianity, the product of several centuries of struggle during the Reconquista, which they hoped to spread across the world.

[29] Facilitating this objective was the Padroado Real, a series of treaties and decrees in which the Pope conferred upon the Portuguese government certain authority in ecclesiastical matters in the foreign territories they conquered.

[30] Upon reaching India the Portuguese quickly ensconced themselves in Goa and established a church hierarchy; soon they set themselves to bringing the native Christians under their dominion.

[citation needed] Following the death of Metropolitan Mar Jacob in 1552, the Portuguese became more aggressive in their efforts to subjugate the Saint Thomas Christians.

[31] Protests on the part of the natives were frustrated by events back in the Church of the East's Mesopotamian heartland, which left them devoid of consistent leadership.

[33] By 1599 the last Metropolitan, Abraham, had died, and the Archbishop of Goa, Aleixo de Menezes, had secured the submission of the young Archdeacon George, the highest remaining representative of the native church hierarchy.

[34] That year Menezes convened the Synod of Diamper, which instituted a number of structural and liturgical reforms to the Indian church.

At the synod, the parishes were brought directly under the Archbishop's authority, certain "superstitious" customs were anathematized, and the traditional variant of the East Syriac Rite, was purged of elements unacceptable by the Latin standards.

He then returned to Syria in order to bring the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Hidayat Allah into communion with Rome.

In 1646, he was in Egypt at the court of the Coptic Pope Mark VI, who dispatched him to India in 1652, evidently in response to a request for aid from Archdeacon Thomas.

Reckoning him an impostor, the Portuguese arrested him, but allowed him to meet with members of the Saint Thomas Christian clergy, whom he impressed greatly.

In a great ceremony before a crucifix and lighted candles, they swore a solemn oath that they would never obey Garcia or the Portuguese again, and that they accepted only the Archdeacon as their shepherd.

The faction was led by Palliveettil Chandy, cousin of Thoma I, who was consecrated as a bishop in 1663 by Carmelite missionaries of the Catholic Church.

In 1665, Gregorios Abdul Jaleel, a bishop sent by the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, arrived in India, and the Saint Thomas Christians under the leadership of the Archdeacon welcomed him.

[42][43] The Gregorios Abdal Jaleel regularised the consecration of Archdeacon as Metropolitan of the Syriac Orthodox Church as per the apostolic standards of Kaiveppu (traditional legitimate way of laying hands by a valid Bishop).

Love from Christ, and from the People of all the Churches, to Lord Gambier, the illustrious, honour able, and renowned President...We, who are called Syrian-Jacobites, and reside in the land of Malabar, even from the times of Mar Thomas, the holy Apostle, until the wall of Cochin was taken in the reign of King Purgis, kept the True Faith according to the manner of the Syrian Jacobites, of real glory, without division or confusion.

[45] By 1809, the Jacobite Syrians fully incorporated the Antiochian Syriac Rite liturgy after the assembly of parish representatives met at Kandanad, Kerala and resolved to fully implement the move to West Syriac Rite through the declaration Kandanad Padiyola, which had been already partially implemented by the same assembly in 1789 at Puthiyacavu.

In 1653, as a move for independence, the Saint Thomas Christians made the Coonan Cross Oath against the oppressive Latin Catholic hierarchy.

[13] In this process, the traditional Persian liturgy of the erstwhile Church of the East in India was replaced among them and this transformation was completed by the 19th century.

[3] But on 16 January 1836, Metropolitan Dionysius IV of Cheppad, convened a Synod at Mavelikara, in protest against the interference of Anglicans in the affairs of the Malankara Church.

[58][59][60][61][62] The British colonial administration abstained from extending their crucial endorsement to any one faction, thereby disengaging themselves from local church matters.