1914
For a long time it was thought the whole of that morning came down a single line: Léon Besse's La Mission du Maduré, printed at Trichinopoly in 1914, which gathered up the papers of the Madurai mission and set the parish's record of 1803 into print. It does not. Nine years before Besse, a Jesuit of this mission, Fr Dessal, had already printed the account in full; and in 1930 a life of Devasahayam, written in Malayalam and in another tradition entirely, recorded the same European woman examining the same three signs. Three witnesses, in three hands, none of them copying the others. It was never carried to Rome, and no commission has ever weighed it. But it reaches us the way this village has always carried it: a dated morning, named witnesses, and two hundred and twenty years of keeping the feast.
What this source establishes
Besse’s typescript (Moumas, p.842) closes the 1803 account with the centenary of 1903 — the same centenary Dessal independently records, and one of the internal proofs the year is 1803, not 1805 (an event cannot have its centenary in its own year). In copyright: quoted, not reproduced.
This is as much of the book as this site prints. It is named in full in the bibliography below.