John de Britto
Portuguese Jesuit missionary and martyr
John de Britto, SJ (also Brito; Portuguese: João de Brito; also known as Arul Anandar; 1 March 1647 – 4 February 1693) was a Portuguese Jesuit missionary and an evangelist, often called "the Portuguese St. Francis Xavier" by Indian Catholics. He is also called "the John the Baptist of India."
Early life and missionary work
John de Britto, born 1 March 1647 in Lisbon, Portugal, was the scion of a powerful aristocratic Portuguese family; his father, Salvador de Britto Pereira, died while serving as Viceroy of the Portuguese colony of Brazil. He joined the Jesuits in 1662, studying at the famous University of Coimbra. He travelled to the missions of Madurai, in Southern India, present-day Tamil Nadu, in 1673 and preached the Christian religion in the region of the Maravar country. He renamed himself Arul Anandar (அருளானந்தர்) in Tamil. The ruler of the Maravar country imprisoned him in 1684. Having been expelled, he returned to Lisbon in 1687 and worked as a missions procurator. King Pedro II wanted him to stay, but in 1690 he returned to the Maravar country with 24 new missionaries.
The Madurai Mission was a bold attempt to establish an Indian Catholic Church that was relatively free of European cultural domination.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q730029. VIAF identifies the subject as 5739522. The Library of Congress control number is n82088561. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1647, 1693, 1662 and 1673.
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This entry incorporates text from “John de Britto” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.