Church bells and school bells: A Christmas story

Tonight, in a 200-year-old Bangalore tradition, the English-speaking faithful will gather for the Christmas Mass at the St Mark’s Cathedral, the first garrison church in the erstwhile Bangalore Cantonment. And the presbyter will invite the congregation, as he did last year, to ‘offer to one another the sign of peace, the namaskar.’ In a 200-year-old Bangalore tradition, the English-speaking faithful will gather for the Christmas Mass at the St Mark’s Cathedral, the first garrison church in the erstwhile Bangalore Cantonment 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 to provide chaplains and schoolmasters for the Europeans at its ‘factories’ 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. 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.