> That's most stories attributed to the apostles.
... all
> The story of st Thomas is ancient and even before colonization
So? All Christian communities made up a bunch of nonsense about themselves, often linking themselves to the early church.
> the prevailing attitude in Europe was that st Thomas and st Bartholomew both proselytized India.
Yes and if you actually look up why that is the 'prevailing attitude' you will find that it is at best based on some 3rd century stories that Thomas might have been in Partia. But even those claims are completely baseless of anything before it.
> You'll find references to this in many books and manuscripts.
No you can't. There is one reference in Origen about Thomas maybe having gone to Parthia but that is just as much a story likely based on all the fake gospels people were writting at that time. We know well that by Origen time there were tons and tons of made up stories about all the (supposed) apostles, including about Thomas.
And then Eusebius later claimed he went to India (and India doesn't even mean necessarily mean India as we understand it). And Eusebius is basically the 'myth maker extraordinaire' of the early Christianity, and his claims is basically what almost everything later is based on. Basically anything the Christian believe about their history comes from this 4th century 'source'. So basically anything Eusebius claims is basically accepted by later church tradition as 'the truth'.
Its quite typical of early christian source to grow the story and add increasingly more and more stuff to them. You can see this even in the bible, compare Paul letters to Paul in Acts. Basically just a random wandering preacher, getting transformed into a magical superhero. Pretty typical of all early Christian figures. You start out with few people doing not so amazing things (likely as there is little evidence they existed at all), and 300 years later, every one of those people is basically the hero of their own expanding story. Characters that are not mentioned anywhere, get inserted into a later versions of the text, and then all of a sudden more text show up mentioning them, and couple 100 years later three is a whole textual tradition about all the things that person supposedly did. Basically its the Marval Cinematic Universe. Thomas is basically Hawkeye.
A much more likely story is that Eusebius book (or other gospels about Thomas) arrived in India and then expand on by the locals.
> In fact many European maps contained the belief that there was a Christian kingdom in Kerala.
There are tons of claims about all kinds of Christian kingdoms in the East threw-out the middle ages.
By the time firm knowledge of Kerla existed it was, much much later and is completely irrelevant to the question of Thomas.
I am not denying Christianity came to India pretty early on. That said, I think the claim that it arrived in the first century are not based on much, neither textual nor archeological evidence has ever been found to my knowledge.
> (2) there is more evidence of st Thomas in Kerala than of Parasurama parting the seas to reveal Kerala.
Sure but that's not how history works.
I am not sticking my finger into whatever Indian ideological drama I seem have stepped into.
Clearly I don't agree with whatever nationalist faction you are talking about. I am just point out what we actually know historically.