I wish I'd had this article in 2009 - István Perczel, on the Malayalam liturgical tongue. It's Aramaic. I've actually attended a Malayalam Episcopal service; I was struck by the Aramaic elements in it.
Perczel explains what happened here. Basically the Portuguese made a mess, introducing Catholicism as the correct Christendom to all those brown bumpkins. Many, many MSS were burned or at least left to rot uncopied. At the same time, the trade routes were opened so all the Near Eastern Christians found out about their wayward brothers. Some of them still spoke Aramaic as a first language - Edessene Syriac. So the Jacobi chuch of Antioch sent men, the Nestorians sent men, and then Catholics sent men to the Nestorians who showed up in India as Syriac-speaking Catholics. Oh and some Anglicans (somehow) horned in on the Jacobi racket as "fellow" not-Catholics.
What a mess! I'll admit to not making much sense of what happened in south India over the centuries.
One weird factor is that the south Indians demanded copies of what the Portuguese had stolen from them. Some traders brought in Syriac, Arabic, and Latin apocrypha - still not entirely lost to the world as of 1600ish AD. (Yes, by now the Indians were using AD and not AG, and even their Jacobites weren't using AG.) So this stuff got copied / translated into Syriac and endured in India. So when you read a Syriac apocryphon in India, you are often not reading the original text but something longago copied into Arabic (sometimes Latin) and then back-translated. One wonders whatever was made of the Pseudo Methodius over there.
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