He Stoops to Globalise, or How a Church came to House World History

David Martin (daim3@cam.ac.uk / Bluesky: @davidmartin8293.bsky.social)

Nestled in the heart of the seventeenth-century Fort St. George, and barely visible through its verdure and petrous neighbours, St. Mary’s Church is an icon of the city of Chennai in Southern India. With a subtitle as glamorous as ‘the oldest Anglican establishment East of Suez’, one would expect a magnificent megalith of a building, rivalling London’s Westminster Abbey (to which it is often compared). While it is on the healthier side of spacious, this Littler St. Mary’s (for it is, in fact, a touch smaller than Cambridge’s beloved Little St. Mary’s), has an altogether different charm, with a flamboyant history to boot.

St. Mary’s was founded by a certain Streynsham Master in 1678 to serve as the religious heart of British merchants in the region. A colourful character himself, Master has a unique history himself. Once completed, the Church caused its founder a good deal of trouble, since it had been built without sanction from either the East India Company’s directors (to whom Master was answerable, being a Company man himself) or the Church of England, which had its own kit of troubles through the Restoration and the never-ending spat with the ‘Romish Church’ (the Catholics). For his troubles in bringing religion to his irreligious ship of shopkeepers, the Directors ordered him back to England to answer for his piety, but not before he wracked up one or two more firsts. He is credited with being the first European to have dealt with, and perhaps accidentally banned in South India, the practice of Sati (the burning of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands).

Read more: He Stoops to Globalise, or How a Church came to House World History

Meanwhile, Littler St. Mary’s carried on and established itself as a centre not only of Anglicanism, but of European Christianity in South Asia. Much to the shock and horror of good Englishmen in India, the building regularly welcomed popish priests into its precincts, and, worse, allowed the children of their Lusophone neighbours to attend the ad hoc school attached to it. The building itself was designed by a pair of military architects — Mr. Edward Foule, the master gunner and Mr. William Dixon, the Chief Gunner, who tried to recreate a homely tableau of a rural vicarage, but wound up with a building whose walls were so high and grounds so compact that it could (and did) function as reasonably good defensive position. ; put in mind the very quaint vicarages that Oliver Goldsmith was so fond of. Not to mention the Church’s many ups and downs, and easily moralised ‘success story’ (of a sort), puts in mind the travails of Dr. Primrose.

As the century turned, the Church began to get its fair share of happy events, including the marriage of a young man named Elihu (soon to be followed by one R. Clive). It was through the former that the Church forged its farthest-flung connection, a certain Cotton Mather, who had, on the instigation of young maser Elihu, sent books and typefaces to India and facilitated the building of some of the earliest (non-Portuguese) printing presses in South Asia. In return, the Church and its parish was kind to Elihu — perhaps too kind. Unfortunately, this young man had developed such a ravenous hunger for profits that he was quite happy to maintain and even promote the local slave trade. The good Reverend Ovington, who headed St. Mary’s was happy to look the other way, being constantly preoccupied by the very interesting dates and wheat crop in the region. Together with the perhaps even more gross income generated from the diamond trade (itself a socio-political powder keg), Elihu retired from Company service and wished to spend some of that [insert appropriate slang terms for diamonds and cash]. Britain was slowly turning against slavery, in principle if not in fact, so it would not have been his best option, rather, he decided to return his friend’s (Cotton Mather’s) generosity by moving to North America and lavishing his wealth on a new college, a little known place at the time which would come to bear his name — Yale.

Later, during the destructive Anglo-Mysore Wars, the Church’s peculiar architecture was once more put to good use as its tough, Johnsonian (re. Boris) interior was perfect for storing munitions and animal feed. Even as Madras (renamed Chennai) lost its primacy in the eyes of the Company, the Church carried on. It eventually added a magnificent painting of the Last Supper, quasi-imitation of Raphael’s piece in Italy, to a growing collection of world trinkets. It was soon joined by Burma Teak furnishings (illegal to make today due to the wood’s extreme scarcity), a massive pipe organ of British extraction, and a collection of Catholic tombstones with a note blaming the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (the 1748 one) for their arrival.

After three-and-a-half years of fairly sanguine existence, the St. Mary’s Church transformed into a mini-museum of the East India Company’s, and later the British Raj’s, global reach. From its marriage records, and headstones to its very foundations and the nicks on its walls from the movement of artillery through its naves, St. Mary’s Church is a living piece of global history.

References


Love, Henry Davidson. Indian Records Series: Vestiges of Old Madras 1640-1800. Government of Madras Press, 1913.

Malden, Charles Herbert. A Hand Book to St. Mary’s Church, Fort St. George, Madras. S.P.C.K. Press, 1905.

Master, Streynsham., and Richard Carnac Sir Temple. The Diaries of Streynsham Master, 1675-1680 : And Other Contemporary Papers Relating Thereto, 1911. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA09388132.

O’Connor, Daniel. The Chaplains of the East India Company, 1601-1858, 2012. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BB07575486.

Stern, Philip J. “The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India.” OUP Catalogue, January 1, 2011. https://ideas.repec.org/b/oxp/obooks/9780195393736.html.

Image Credits: Side view of St. Mary’s Church, Chennai, taken by the author.