ABSTRACT
Leaving aside Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg's devil, in this chapter the author identifies four patterns in Evangelical developments among the Malabarians of eighteenth-century Tranquebar and Tanjore. They are: the Roman Catholics who preceded the Pietists, the soldiers who spread Evangelical thought and worship, the expansion of cultic sites to the southern region of Tirunelveli, and the emergence of a distinctive Velalan Protestant culture. When Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Pluetschau arrived in Tranquebar at the beginning of the eighteenth century, they began by using Catholic literature in Portuguese and Tamil; and Roman Catholic 'Portuguese' and Malabarians formed a significant portion of their earliest converts. Once the mission had been established in Tranquebar, the Evangelical message spread first through the Malabarians, and through soldiers who were both Malabarian and European. 'The progress of the church in India', Stephen Neill observed, 'was at all times linked to the mobility of Christians, and especially of Christian soldiers in the armies of the Company and of local rulers'.
