" Kerala’s Christians belong to the oldest Christian community in the world outside Palestine. And when St Thomas, one of Jesus’s twelve apostles, brought Christianity to Kerala, it is said he was welcomed on shore by a flute-playing Jewish girl. St Thomas made converts among the high-born elite, the Namboodiri Brahmins, which meant there were Indians whose families had practised Christianity for far longer than the ancestors of any Briton could lay claim to. "

― Shashi Tharoor , An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India