The Canara Christians

The deportation happened. It was ordered by the state, carried out on a community rather than on individuals, and lasted until the fall of Srirangapatna in 1799 released the survivors. Its consequences for Mangalorean Catholics — deaths on the march, families broken, property confiscated, churches destroyed — are recorded in the community's own tradition, in Portuguese diplomatic correspondence, and in the captivity narrative of James Scurry, a British sailor held alongside them.

Nothing on this page is offered to make that smaller. What follows is an attempt to establish what the evidence supports about why it was done, to how many, and with what religious content.

The order came weeks after the Second Anglo-Mysore War ended, and the war is the reason for it. Canara had just been the theatre of a British invasion, and the Christian community of the coast had taken the British side.

When General Richard Matthews landed on the west coast and took Bednur in 1783, Canara Christians acted as his spies and guides. Around thirty-five Christians serving in the Mysore army deserted to him. Matthews wrote, shortly before Bednur fell back to Mysore, that he had borrowed 33,000 rupees from the Canara Christians. During the long Mysorean siege of Mangalore, they assisted Colonel Campbell's garrison in secret, and were connected to a plot for Tipu Sultan's overthrow. The head of the Mount Marian congregation supplied the British garrison with a thousand bags of rice.

These are not later British claims: most come from Portuguese archival material and from Mysorean sources, and they are set out by Mohibbul Hasan with citations to the Goa records. Tipu Sultan regarded a community of his own subjects as having gone over to an invading enemy in wartime. The punishment fell on the whole community regardless of who had actually done it.

Orders were issued in February 1784, and the seizure was carried out across the Canara coast. The Christian colony at Mount Marian was banished to Cochin. Some Canara Christians were exiled to Goa. The larger body was marched inland as prisoners to Srirangapatna and Chitaldurg, where they remained. One man, an accomplice in the plot against Tipu Sultan, was hanged.

The march inland — several hundred kilometres, over the Western Ghats, under guard — is where the community's tradition places the greatest mortality, and there is no reason to doubt that it was lethal. Churches on the coast were destroyed.

No count exists that was made by a disinterested party. What exists is a set of figures from people with positions, and the honest thing is to name each one rather than choose a total and present it as fact.

20,000 — in a letter from the Viceroy of Goa to the Portuguese Secretary of State. 40,000 — in a later letter from the same Viceroy. About 30,000 — in another Portuguese account. 60,000 — the figure given by Mark Wilks, which Hasan judges grossly exaggerated. Higher totals still circulate in modern writing, sometimes attributed to Mysorean court chronicles which, on this subject, inflate in the opposite direction and for the opposite reason.

Hasan's own conclusion is that it is difficult to estimate the number affected. That is also this site's conclusion. The defensible statement is that a community numbering in the tens of thousands was deported, and that mortality among them was very high.

Whether the captivity was a programme of forced conversion, or a political internment inside which conversions occurred, is the part of this episode that scholarship has not settled.

This episode is documented from an angle most of the reign is not. Because the community was under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Goa, the Portuguese state took an interest and generated a correspondence that survives in the Goa archives — a body of material that is neither British war propaganda nor Mysorean court panegyric. Scurry's narrative adds an eyewitness who was himself a captive, with the distortions of a man writing for a British audience about his own suffering.

What none of it produces is a count, or a copy of the original order with its reasoning. That absence is why the figures range by a factor of three, and why anyone quoting a single confident total is telling you more about their argument than about 1784.

The war that preceded it is covered in the Second Anglo-Mysore War; the wider question in Religious Policy; and Scurry's narrative among the primary sources. Susan Bayly's study is published by Cambridge University Press.