[3] A pioneer of Christian ecumenism in India, Azariah had a complex relationship with Mahatma Gandhi, who at least once called him postcolonial Indians' "Enemy Number One.

"[4] Vedanayakam Samuel Azariah was born in 1874 in the village of Vellalanvilai, Thoothukudi District, Tamil Nadu, in the far south of India to Christian (Anglican) priest Thomas Vedanayagam, and his second wife Ellen.

The following year Azariah revitalized a long-dormant proposal and thus helped form the Indian Missionary Society (IMS)[7] (based in Tinnevelly), whereby fellow Tamil Christians could evangelize among their brethren.

Azariah also served as secretary of the YMCA in south India from 1895 to 1909, and remained convinced of the importance of indigenization in the Christian mission.

On Christmas Day, 1905, in Carey's library at Serampore in West Bengal, the interdenominational National Missionary Society was founded, with Azariah as its secretary and a mission to evangelize not only in India, but also in Afghanistan, Tibet, and Nepal.

He focused on a pan-Asian global vision and converting Asians, rather than nationalists' call to free Asia from Western domination.

In 1898, Azariah married Ambu Mariammal Samuel, one of the first Christian women in South India to take a college course, whom he described as "the most spiritually minded girl in Tirunelveli.

[10] In 1909, at age 35, Azariah was ordained as an Anglican priest, left his positions with the YMCA, learned Telugu and began as a missionary in Dornakal.

Azariah continued to speak widely on the need for indigenisation, including at the 1910 World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh.

Initially comprising the south-east corner of the Nizam's Dominions in Hyderabad, it soon added the District of Dummagudem, where the Church Missionary Society (CMS) worked.

In 1920, the Episcopal Synod resolved that all the areas in which either the low-church CMS or the high church Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) evangelized in the Telugu country would become part of this diocese, transforming it into one of the largest (in terms of numbers of Christians) in India.

Bishop Azariah lived for a time in a tent near his new cathedral, but spent most of his episcopate traveling across his vast diocese by bullock cart or bicycle, usually accompanied by his wife and coworker, Anbu.

Known by the affectionate honorific Thandrigaru ("father"), Azariah inspired mass movements that brought roughly 200,000 outcast Malas and Madigas, tribals and low-caste non-Brahmins into his fledgling church.

By 1935, his diocese had 250 ordained Indian clergy and over 2,000 village teachers, plus medical clinics, cooperative societies, and printing presses.

[15] While also an Indian nationalist, Azariah believed Hinduism inherently repressive and grounded in a destructive caste system.