Pius Malekandathil

• 1. Introduction

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  Pius Malekandathil, born in 1960, holds two distinct vocations that his career has never tried to separate. He is an ordained priest of the Syro-Malabar Church. He also spent decades as a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University's Centre for Historical Studies in New Delhi. There he became a recognized authority on medieval India and on the Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala. His scholarship tracks how the Indian Ocean connected the subcontinent to the wider world. It also traces how European powers engaged with what they found on India's shores. His first book, published in 1999, examined the relationship between the Germans, the Portuguese, and India.

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• 2. Contested Waters

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  In 2001, Malekandathil published Portuguese Cochin and the Maritime Trade of India, 1500-1663. That study covered more than a century and a half of commercial activity along the Indian coast. Nine years later, in 2010, he released Maritime India: Trade, Religion and Polity, the Indian Ocean. That book took a wider view, treating trade, religion, and political organization as interconnected aspects of the ocean's history.

  In 2013, he published The Mughals, the Portuguese and the Indian Ocean: Changing Imageries of Maritime India. That title reflects his consistent interest in how rival powers understood the same waters.

  Yogesh Sharma joined Malekandathil as co-editor on Cities in Medieval India in 2014, a collection that examined urban life across the medieval period. In 2019, he co-edited a further volume with Lotika Varadarajan and Amar Farooqui: India, the Portuguese and maritime interactions. The religious dimension running through his maritime scholarship would eventually draw him to a specific text from the sixteenth century.

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• 3. Faith and the Church

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  In 2003, Malekandathil translated and edited a sixteenth-century Portuguese account of the Malabar coast. The original text was written by Antonio de Gouvea and centered on the figure of Dom Alexis de Menezes. The work appeared under the title Jornada of Dom Alexis de Menezes: A Portuguese Account of the Sixteenth Century Malabar.

  His scholarly attention to Christianity in India extended through to 2016. That year he co-edited Christianity in Indian History: Issues of Culture, Power, and Knowledge. His co-editors were Joy L.K. Pachuau and Tanika Sarkar. The collection engaged Christianity as a full subject in Indian historical scholarship. The title itself announced the stakes: culture, power, and knowledge.

  Within the Syro-Malabar Church, he holds a senior administrative position. He serves as Protosyncellus of the Eparchy of Kothamangalam. That position has outlasted his academic career at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

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