One of Bengaluru’s heritage buildings that is in the news now is All Saints’ Church. Bangalore Metro wishes to temporarily acquire a good bit of the garden in front of the church to build an underground station. Church members are resisting the acquisition because of the number of old trees that will be lost, and because of fears that the drilling may damage the building.
The foundation stone of this church was laid on November 27, 1869, in a ceremony presided over by S.T. Pettigrew, who established the church.
Samuel Thomas Pettigrew was born in London in 1827. In 1855, armed with a Masters degree from Cambridge, he came over to India as a missionary. He was first appointed Assistant Chaplain in the Madras establishment of the East India Company. Apart from preaching, Pettigrew was involved in sundry other things. When he was posted in Kamptee near Nagpur, he converted a derelict cemetery into a beautiful garden.
In Thiruvananthapuram, he set up a zoo and public gardens. And in Bengaluru, Pettigrew founded the Bishop Cotton Schools, Cathedral School, an orphanage and All Saints’ Church.
Pettigrew established All Saints’ primarily to cater to retired European soldiers (many with Indian wives) and their families who could not be accommodated in the already overcrowded St. Mark’s Church. Unlike some of the other cantonment churches, this one was built entirely with donations from the public. Pettigrew himself drew up the initial designs for the building, which were promptly rejected by the Church Building Society in Madras. The church was finally designed by the “accomplished government architect, Mr. Chisholm,” he says.
This is none other than the celebrated Robert Fellowes Chisholm, a legend in architecture and one of the pioneers of the so-called Indo-Saracenic style that was later to become so popular in India. Several iconic buildings across the country bear his stamp including Senate House and Presidency College in Chennai, Napier Museum in Thiruvananthapuram and the New College building in Vadodara. All Saints’ Church is likely the only Chisholm-designed building in Bengaluru. The church is an early part of Chisholm’s oeuvre, a time when he was known to favour the Gothic Revival style. The church has a standard Latin Cross plan with a nave and transepts.
Like most churches (and temples), it faces east, with the transepts running north-south. T.P. Issar in his The City Beautiful, describes the Gothic-styled church as ‘unusual.’
Among its many unique features are the very steeply sloping tiled roofs and the rubble masonry walls. The tall, narrow windows with their sharp, pointed arches and prominent stone voussoirs are characteristically Gothic, as are the dormer windows and the gables.
Visual delight
Inside, the open iron and wooden arched and scissor trusses are very visually arresting. Unusually, the truss ribs spring from a height of just 7 feet. The large rose window at the entrance has some lovely stained glass as does the altar end.
The memorial plaques and tablets are also very interesting. One that I particularly liked was dedicated to Elizabeth, wife of Standish Lee, the Mysore Government’s Sanitary Engineer who designed the extensions of Basavanagudi and Malleswaram along sanitary lines.
The church is rich in symbolism. The gable at the entrance porch has a prominent circle with an enclosed triangle. The circle, being without beginning or end, symbolises eternity or God.
Within that, the equilateral triangle represents the Holy Trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The trefoil-shaped bargeboards in some of the eaves also symbolise the Holy Trinity.
Some windows have quatrefoil motifs – formed by four intersecting circles, and very common in Gothic architecture – which symbolise the four evangelists.
(The author is Convenor, INTACH-Bangalore, and a researcher)
