Looking at it, you could almost mistake it for St. George’s Cathedral on the eponymous road in Chennai. This, however, is a photo of St. John’s Church, Kolkata. The similarity is not surprising, given that both houses of worship are modelled on London’s St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields Church, designed by James Gibbs.
The Kolkata church, planned by James Agg, is the older, dating to 1787. It served as the cathedral for the city till 1847, when the grander St. Paul’s superseded it in status. In 1815, when a cathedral for Madras had to be built, the architect Major Thomas Fiott de Havilland obviously copied what was then the principal church of Calcutta.
Sriram V. In the vast compound is a rotunda — a dome supported by twelve columns. This was erected in 1774 to commemorate the British who fell in the Second Rohilla War. When in 1800, the residents of Madras received from London the marble statue of Lord Cornwallis they had commissioned, it needed a suitable canopy to house it. The Rohilla monument was evidently the inspiration for the rotunda that was put up in Fort St. George for this. It now stands in a lawn by the side of the Assembly building. The statue was later shifted to the Fort Museum, where it dominates the stairwell.
St. John’s was built on the site of an old British graveyard, and some of the monuments still survive. One of these is a lime-and-mortar octagon, inside which on a wall is the tombstone of Job Charnock. He was no stranger to Madras, arriving here from Hooghly in 1689, following a Mughal invasion. With him was his Hindu wife, whom he had rescued from the funeral pyre of her first husband ( Job Charnocker Bibi is a popular Bengali play till date). Their three daughters were baptised at St. Mary’s, the font used for this still surviving there. It is made of Pallavaram gneiss, a local variety of granite.
In 1690, Job Charnock returned to Bengal and founded the settlement of Calcutta. He died in 1692, and his tombstone is of Pallavaram gneiss, a material unknown then in Calcutta and referred to as Charnockite thereafter. Incidentally, the black pillars that front the Tamil Nadu Assembly are also of Charnockite. Close-by is the tomb of Frances, ‘Begum’ Johnson, the girl from Cuddalore who outlived four husbands, dying at 89. But that is another story.
