Metropolitanate of India (Syriac: Beth Hindaye) was an East Syriac ecclesiastical province of the Church of the East, from the seventh to the sixteenth century. The Malabar Coast of India had long been home to a thriving Eastern Christian community, known as the St. Thomas Christians. The community traces its origins to the evangelical activity of Thomas the Apostle in the 1st century. The Christian communities in India were using the East Syriac Rite, the traditional liturgical rite of the Church of the East. They also adopted some aspects of Dyophysitism, in accordance with theology of the Church of the East. Initially, they belonged to the metropolitan province of Fars, but were detached from that province in the 7th century, and again in the 8th, and given their own metropolitan bishop