BOMBAY ETCHED in Amchi Mumbai…..Pronoti Datta
Stained Glass Panels In Churches & Old Buildings Offer Glimpses Of City’s History
Stained Glass Panels In Churches & Old Buildings Offer Glimpses Of City’s History
The next time you visit the Church of St John the Evangelist, more commonly known as Afghan Church, keep an eye out for a stained glass window showing the three magi genuflecting before the newborn Jesus. The piece was repaired by students of the JJ School of Art in 1920. It’s unusual, and amusing, as the repairers dressed the magi in kurtas, turbans and chappals, instead of medieval robes and slippers.
For more history on the city’s vast repertoire of stained glass motifs, take a look at Stories in Glass: The Stained Glass Heritage of Bombay, a new book by British writer Jude Holliday. The illustrated book dwells in detail on institutions that have large caches of stained glass in the city. These include Afghan Church, St Thomas’s Cathedral, the University of Mumbai and smaller buildings like the JN Petit Institute and the Keneseth Eliyahoo synagogue.
A practitioner of stained glass, Holliday was amazed with the amount of stained glass in Mumbai when she first visited the city in 1993. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” she said in a phone interview from Bijapur village in Rajasthan, where she and her husband spend four months every year, writing and teaching English to local girls. “But there was no information on it so I thought I better find out myself.” Holliday proceeded to do her PhD from Mumbai University on the subject.
Stained glass arrived in Bombay in the nineteenth century. The glass was made in workshops in England and then shipped to Bombay. Initially stained glass adorned churches and cathedrals. Later on, it was used to decorate civic buildings and even private homes. “A lot of it was of exceptionally high quality,” Holliday said. “It was made in some of the best studios of the nineteenth century.” Some works of stained glass in churches and public buildings are memorials commissioned by people.
For instance, some of the city’s churches have stained glass windows dedicated to British soldiers who lost their lives in battles. The locals who commissioned stained glass panels were usually Parsis and Baghdadi Jews. The two communities had Western sensibilities and were wealthy enough to afford the hefty charges of commissioning and shipping stained glass.
A wonderful example of local patronage is the reading room for the JN Petit Institute, which has portraits of members of the Petit family in stained glass. “Stained glass is such a personal thing,” Holliday said. “Somebody actually paid for those and so it has a more intimate feel.”
* WINDOWS TO THE PAST: (Left) The upper clerestory lights in the east window of St Thomas’s Cathedral in south Mumbai depict archangels flanking Christ. (Above) The stained glass windows at St Stephen’s Church in Bandra
* QUIET BEAUTY: Stained glass of geometric shapes and flower heads in the reading room of the University of Mumbai
* PORTRAITS IN GLASS: A wonderful example of local patronage is the reading room for the JN Petit Institute in Fort which has portraits of members of the Petit family in stained glass