By David Martin (Bluesky: @davidmartin8293.bsky.social Substack: @davidmartin8293
A cathedral, the seat of a bishop, is normally an august building. From the gargoyle-studded Notre Dame de Paris to the bird-woman-spotted St. Paul’s of London, monuments that bear this name are meant to represent an ancient genealogy of European Christendom. But what happens when said Christendom arrives on foreign shores with neither money nor hellfire to coax their construction? Little oddments of memory and design are the answer. Colonial churches and cathedrals have a peculiar way of reinventing themselves, palimpsest-like, as the colonial fades and the postcolonial dawns.
Once declared the ‘ugliest building ever built’, St. Mark’s Cathedral (née Church) was perhaps not designed to stun and awe, which is at least partly what Rev. Frank Penny thought when he made his cruel pronouncement in 1901. Founded in 1808 as a cantonment church to serve the military garrison of the growing city, the good reverend, who arrived in India in 1877, likely saw the old church at the worst possible time. It was suffering from a situation contemporary Bangaloreans are all too familiar with — built to house 400 communicants, near 2000 faithful were trying to call the Church ‘parish’ by the end of the nineteenth century. As spacious as the grounds were, the church building itself was rather small, prompting the erection of a new building in 1902 (which promptly collapsed three years later). A good two decades thence, a fire consumed the Church and rendered it out of commission for four years.
Today, upon viewing the Cathedral’s staid, but beautiful precincts, it is hard to give the good Reverend Penny’s declaration much credence. But his view from a century-and-a-quarter ago provides an important point of triangulation to measure what the postcolonial has wrought and how it can be understood. As much as St. Mark’s is a classic colonial building, it does bear some fascinating features which are worth studying.
Take for instance the aforementioned spacious grounds. Many colonial churches in India are blessed with these wide spaces and universally transform them into pulsing green arteries for their cities. But St. Mark’s has a peculiarity — there’s a good ten or fifteen meters between its walls and the nearest tree (except near its front portico, which does not quite count since it is not really a wall). Any half-way decent mason will tell you not to plant trees too close to a building lest their roots undermine the structure’s foundations. But what’s even more peculiar is that there is nearly no permanent foliage of any kind abutting the Cathedral’s ample walls, as there would be in many English ecclesias of its size. It is a rarity even in India where most churches pride themselves on their manicured bushes. All there is is a never-ending carousel of pot plants that are arranged, rearranged and disappeared into unseen storage pits.
Before any hint of tinfoil hats appears, it must be noted that many of these decisions are made for utterly homely reasons. Trees and plants, while gorgeous, can be a menace to maintain right next to a glowing white church, and the fact that the Cathedral grew over the course of two centuries means that space was ever a premium commodity. Moreover, unlike the sedate shrubs in a prim English Garden, the flora of Bangalore can be a bit more, ‘independently minded’, so to speak. Not to mention the fact that many of the plants in St. Mark’s, while native to India, are not home to the City itself, making their upkeep that much harder.
Turning towards the Cathedral itself, St. Mark’s boasts a litany of finery, from Genoese Marble, to rare teak-wood furnishings. In this, at least, it comes close to rivalling its model St. Paul’s in London. Yet, Italian stones and vast lignified interiors are put to very different tests in temperate London compared to torrid Bangalore. What began in 1808 as a simple attempt to give homesick soldiers a slice of Blighty, was forced to transform to account for its tropical home. The carefully orchestrated foliage, the constantly dusted, washed and touched-up walls, and the room-fulls of preservation chemicals are all designed to preserve, and when unpreservable, update, the humble Cathedral.
Past its gentle birth, through its awkward ugly phase, St. Mark’s had to grow into something of a ‘Cathedral of Theseus’, eternally shifting, one brick at a time, to better inhabit its home, Bangalore. It is a curious form of the postcolonial, containing something of its erring spirit, but always renewed in new and unexpected ways.
About the Author:
David Martin is a second year Ph.D. student at St. Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. His research explores the relationship between caste and Anglicanism in the realms of education and social reform in nineteenth century South India. He also works on cultural and urban histories of the region and the wider Indian Ocean.
Contact: daim3@cam.ac.uk
References:
Love, Henry Davidson. Indian Records Series: Vestiges of Old Madras 1640-1800. Government of Madras Press, 1913.
Mathews, Shobana P., and David A.I. Martin, “From Pastiche to Palimpest: Reading Bangalore’s Layered History through the Microcosm of Koshy’s Coffee House”. Remembering Echoes in the Mind and Heart: A Collection. ed. Robert B. Galin. London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (2024).
Maxwell, Ian Douglas. “Alexander Duff and the theological and philosophical background to the General Assembly’s Mission in Calcutta to 1840.” Annexe Thesis Digitisation Project 2018 Block 19 (1995).
Penny, Frank. The Church in Madras: Being the history of the ecclesiastical and missionary action of the East India Company in the Presidency of Madras in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Vol. 1. Murray, 1904.
Sunquist, Scott W., and Peter Lim. “Presbyterians in Asia.” The Oxford Handbook of Presbyterianism (2019): 159 – 176.
N/A. ‘The Colonial Church’. The Church of England Magazine. Vol. 9 July-December, 1840.
doinghistoryinpublic.org 
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One response to “Oddments of Imperium: St. Mark’s of Bangalore”
Great piece