Have the Flames of Diamper Destroyed All the Old Manuscripts of the Saint Thomas Christians?

It had been a common place in the literature about the Saint Thomas Christians of South India that the diocesan Synod of Diamper, held in 1599 upon the order of the Portuguese Archbishop of Goa, Aleixo de Menezes, which condemned to destruction by the fire a number of Syriac books, deemed heretical by the Portuguese, has annihilated the precolonial literary heritage of the community. Yet, as Mihail Bulgakov says, "books are not burning" and there are a number of texts, scattered in Indian and European archives and libraries, which have survived the Diamper decisions. In fact, manuscripts were preserved both by the local Christian communities that hid them from the colonial authorities and by the missionaries themselves who, after confiscating them, preserved them. Also, the Syrian Christian scribes continued to copy the texts condemned well into the nineteenth century. This article, published in 2006, is a first survey of the texts that have survived Diamper. Yet, its conclusions are to be modified at one point: "the Book of Bar Khaldon" from which excerpts have survived in three manuscripts, is nothing else than the Life of Joseph Busnaya, but in a fuller version that is not transmitted to us. Thus, the Life's teaching should be reconstructed on the basis of the extant manuscript, the Indian fragments and Francisco Roz's reading notes.