THE SYRIAC CHANT TRADITIONS IN SOUTH INDIA

The Syriac (Aramaic) liturgy and liturgical chants that originated in the Middle East found their way into South India through immigrant Christians sometime before the fifth century. Continuous contact between the "Syrian Christians " (descendants of Hindu converts and immigrant Christians) 1 in India and the Persian Church kept the chant tradition rejuvenated in the subsequent centuries. Due to divisions and varying ecclesiastical allegiances starting from the sixteenth century, there are now two liturgical and three chant traditions among the Syrian Christians. The Syro-Malabar Church (in union with Rome) and the Church of the East (Diophysite, also known as Nestorian) continue the Chaldean liturgy, which was originally in East Syriac, while the Syrian Orthodox Church (Monophysite, also known as Jacobite) adopted the Antiochene liturgy, which was originally in West Syriac. Although the first two Churches follow the same liturgical tradition with minor variations, their musical repertoires as they exist today are different from each other. As a means of preserving their individual identity, all three Churches retained most of the original Syriac melodies in the process of vernacularizing the liturgies to Malayalam since the 1960s. Thus, the melodies that were once associated with Syria