In fact, it is said that St. Thomas, one of Jesus’ disciples, went to India, and there have been some Christians in India for about 2000 years, well before the Portuguese. Actually link I posted above has details of the atrocities by the Portuguese. I could only read about 5 pages of that book a day.
Hi, lj. As I may have mentioned before, my sister married a doctor from Bombay .... they did two weddings, one over there and one here in the States. Over in India, they got married in his mother's church, which is precisely that Christian community of which you speak. The priest's vestments were white and he wore a tall white crown or "trash-can" headdress very similar to the Maronite Catholics' (the Indian community there also is in communion with Rome), and the ceremony was in Syriac (successor language to Aramaic, about 300 years younger), Hindi, and English. The doctor's father's ascending line were Church of India, or Anglican.
The Thomasine (my made-up word) communion in India is about 20% of the Indian Christian population, the rest being either Roman Catholic (missionized through Goa) or Anglican.
The Portuguese priests who served in Goa brought back the first Sanskrit grammars in Western languages; they recognized the similarities to Greek, and so did Western scholars. The discovery kicked off the study of philology and linguistics.
All the languages of the world are now thought to be related, and Greek, Sanskrit, and both the Romance and Germanic families, as well as the Baltic and Slavic languages, are all part of the Indo-European family, which began on the north shore of the Black Sea in what is now the Ukraine and Moldova.