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Church bells and school bells: A Christmas story
When the Bangalore Cantonment was first conceived in 1805 as a dedicated British military station, only factories had churches
It’s Christmas Eve! Tonight, in a 200-year-old Bangalore tradition, the English-speaking faithful (all faiths welcome) will gather for the Christmas Mass at the St Mark’s Cathedral, the first garrison church in the erstwhile Bangalore Cantonment. As the bells toll the midnight hour, bread will be broken in joyous celebration of the birth of Mary’s boy-child. And the presbyter will invite the congregation, as he did last year, to ‘offer to one another the sign of peace, the namaskar.’
It is also a year-end tradition to look back and take stock, so let us rewind to 1698, to a royal charter that obliged the East India Company (EIC) to provide chaplains and schoolmasters for the Europeans at its ‘factories’ (trading posts) in India, while keeping its nose out of the religious and educational business of the Indians themselves, so as not to antagonize them. By 1812, when St Mark’s became the first garrison church of the Bangalore Cantonment, things had changed considerably. With the fall of Tipu Sultan in 1799, the EIC controlled most of the south; less concerned about local sentiment, the 1813 Charter allowed the clergy to set up churches and schools wherever they wished.
When the Bangalore Cantonment was first conceived in 1805 as a dedicated British military station, only factories had churches. By 1807, the EIC realized that garrison churches were equally important. In 1808, ground was broken for Bangalore’s first ‘proper’ church (the Fort chapel in the old Pettah, and the St Mary’s chapel in Shivajinagar, were more makeshift), on the highest point of the ridge that is today MG Road. Its location at the western end of the Cantonment was not accidental – the church was also meant to service the garrisons at the Pettah, further west. Named for one of Jesus’ 12 apostles, St Mark’s was consecrated by the Anglican bishop of Calcutta in 1816.
In 1831, Governor General William Bentinck dismissed the Maharaja of Mysore’s government, and soon after, moved the administrative capital to Bangalore, burnishing St Mark’s sheen. It is no wonder that many of its presbyters, men of great influence in the community, went on to establish new churches – and schools – in the city.
By law, a military station could only have one church, but by the late 1840s, the population of the Cantonment had grown so much that a second church was commissioned. It was the presbyter of St Mark’s, Rev WW Lutyens, who took responsibility for the look and feel of the second church, personally designing its interiors and embellishments. In 1851, the Holy Trinity Church opened its doors at the other end of the MG Road ridge.
In 1853, Rev R Posnett, assistant presbyter of St Mark’s, built a room to serve as a school for Eurasian (Anglo-Indian) children, who were not welcome at schools for Europeans, on the Mootocherry Ridge (today the St John’s Hill). By 1857, through the hard work of the good Reverend, the majestic St John’s Church had been completed. Within its compound, the sprawling St John’s High School, all grown up from the little schoolroom, continues to serve the city today.
Rev ST Pettigrew, who served as presbyter in two stints between 1864 and 1872, founded the Bishop Cotton’s schools in 1865 (to offer an Anglican alternative to the Catholic schools in the Cantonment), named after the renowned educationist and then Bishop of Calcutta, George Cotton. He was also involved in the extensive renovations of St Paul’s, Bangalore’s first Tamil Anglican church (consecrated 1840) in 1865, and the establishment, in 1870, of the All Saints’ Church on Hosur Road, so beautifully restored by INTACH a few months ago.
Yup, a lot of good Bangaloreans to thank this Christmas. Have a blessed Noel, y’all!
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)
